Randolph’s eyes narrowed and he puckered his lips peevishly.
‘That will be looked into,’ he said, and then he walked across and held James’s face in one of his huge fists. ‘I made a fortune in the war,’ he said, ‘selling arms to the United States government and her allies, but I also fought in it.’
‘I know,’ said James. ‘I heard your speech at Eton.’
Randolph struck a heroic pose, his chest thrust out. ‘I didn’t have to fight, Bond. A great many other businessmen spent a pile of money ensuring that they didn’t go to war. Ensuring that they were considered too important to get blood on their hands. But not me, I joined the army. I came over to Europe. I fought for a year. My brother, Algar, was perfectly capable of running the company while I was away. But do you know why I fought? Was it patriotism? Was it a belief that our side was right and their side was wrong? No, sir. I fought because I wanted to see war at first hand, I wanted to taste it, I wanted to confront death and spit in his face.’
The gleam of madness was burning fiercely in Randolph’s eyes. Why was he telling James this? Why did he feel the need to show off to him?
And then James realised – Randolph couldn’t tell anyone else. It was all secret. But he could talk to James. He could talk to James, because – James gripped his knuckles together and bit his cheek – because James wasn’t going to live to tell anyone else.
‘And I wanted to test myself,’ said Randolph passionately. ‘To see if I was a man.’
‘And are you?’ said James with false innocence. If he was already doomed, it didn’t really matter what he said or did any more.
‘Don’t try and mock me, boy.’
‘Please,’ said James. ‘It’s late and I’m tired and you are frankly beginning to get a little boring. If you’re going to punish me, could you please get on with it.’
‘All in good time, I am just now coming to the interesting part.’
‘That remains to be seen.’
‘Be silent!’ Randolph snapped. ‘When I returned to America after the war, I set to work. I had seen a lot of things on those muddy, bloody battlefields of Flanders. I had seen with my own eyes the frailty of human beings. I saw how weak they were, how useless, how easily they came apart and perished. It struck me that the future of warfare was not in making better weapons; it was in making better people – stronger, bigger, more fearless, more ruthless. But it’s damned hard, experimenting on human beings.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ said James.
‘Oh, spare me the disapproval. You’re all the same. They didn’t appreciate what I was doing in the United States. Americans can be very sentimental. They said it was immoral, inhuman. What did they know about humanity? The generals with all their fancy medals thought it was just fine to send millions of young men off to die in a war, but they couldn’t spare me a handful to study in my laboratory. I had to become more and more secretive, I had to surround myself with more and more layers of protection; but the hardest thing was always finding living specimens to work with.’
James was starting to get some idea of where all this was going, what his fate might be – and he didn’t like it one bit. Now that his head was clearing, he tried to focus his mind and look around for a possible way out of this hellish room.
‘It wasn’t just me,’ Randolph went on. ‘My brother, Algar, was the true genius. I had the ideas, but he was the one who knew how to put them into practice. He was a brilliant scientist, totally dedicated to his work, and nothing else mattered to him.’
‘But he objected to what you were doing, didn’t he?’ said James. ‘And you killed him.’
Randolph paused for a moment, staring at James, and then burst out laughing, his voice bouncing off the bare walls of the laboratory and setting off a strange, animal echo, like the laughter of demons.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ said Randolph. ‘I did nothing to him. He did it all himself. As I say, we had problems finding humans to work with, so Algar used the only body he could… his own. Perhaps you would like to meet him properly. MacSawney, bring out my brother.’
MacSawney nodded, then shuffled to the back of the room, where James heard him unlocking something. There was a pause and an angry shout, and then there came that horrible shuffling and wheezing sound that James knew so well, and a huge, hideous shape lumbered into view.
James recoiled, but then forced himself to look at what had once been a man. Algar was taller than Randolph, though stooped over. His arms were enormous, and great knots of swollen muscle showed through his thin, filthy shirt, but there was something ruined about him, as if he could hardly carry his own great weight. His skin was smooth and shiny and grey, stretched tight over his vast frame, and it glistened with oily sweat. The face was wrecked; it looked like it had split down the middle and been forced apart, so that the nose was flattened and stretched, the teeth had separated and the eyes had curved round almost to the side of his head.
The eyes were the worst part. They were dark and wet, and James saw in them, not murder, but sadness and pain.
It was then that James realised that Algar’s feet were chained together and MacSawney was pointing a shotgun at his back.
‘My dear brother.’ Randolph laughed. ‘You know, the irony is, we are twins, near as damn it identical. But there was always a difference between us…’
Randolph went over and stood next to his brother, beaming at James.
‘Algar was considered the better-looking one. Ha, ha, ha, ha!’
21
Hell Will Endure
‘The road to hell is smooth, Bond, and the doors are always open.’ Randolph grinned.
‘What’s the motto of that snobby school you boys attend? “Eton will endure”? Well, I have no doubt that it will; it’s been there for a few hundred years so it’ll probably stand for a few hundred more. But do you know what is really certain? Death. As long as men walk the surface of this earth, there will be pain and death and suffering. Death will endure. War will endure. Hell will endure, and, as long as its gates are open, I’ll be in business. As long as one man wants to bash another man’s brains out, I’ll be standing, ready to sell him a club.’
Food had been brought in, and James was sitting at one of the laboratory benches with Lord Hellebore and the young scientist, who had been introduced as Dr Perseus Friend.
They seemed keen for him to eat, even though he had no appetite. He forced down a couple of slices of ham, but they stuck in his throat and his saliva felt like glue.
‘It’s not my fault that men are the way they are,’ Randolph went on. ‘And only a fool would fail to profit from it. Men were born to kill. It’s what we do best. And I’ll help them in any way I can. Now, how can anyone say that that is wrong?’
‘I had the same problems with my work before,’ said Dr Friend. ‘Nobody appreciates a visionary. Some of the diseases I perfected were quite beautiful.’
‘What you are doing is evil,’ said James, pushing his plate away.
Randolph laughed. ‘Evil? What a quaint idea. As if a dead man cares whether he’s killed by a nice clean bullet, or a cloud of gas or the plague. Our governments make up the rules for warfare. It’s OK to do this, but it’s not OK to do that. And you’re telling me, that somehow makes the whole damned thing acceptable, does it? Pah! They can dress it up pretty, they can try and pretend it’s civilised. It ain’t. War is dirty. I should know, I was in one.’
Randolph stopped and stood up. MacSawney was still standing to one side, keeping one eye, and the barrel of his gun, fixed on Algar. Randolph walked over to the creature who had once been his twin, and Algar cowered away from him.
‘How much do you know about the human body, Bond?’ Randolph said.
‘Only what I’ve learnt at school.’
‘You know about the nervous system, then? The network that sends electric signals round your body, to activate the muscles, to feel pleasure… and pain.’
He raised his fist, and once again Algar shrank
away from him.
‘Well, there’s another system – the endocrine system – which is even more important, but is still only poorly understood. The messages in the endocrine system are sent as chemicals, which are produced in various glands and travel through your body in the blood.’
‘Hormones,’ said James. ‘My aunt taught me a little about them, but I’ve forgotten most of it.’
‘Hormones is right,’ Randolph nodded. ‘And they affect us in many different ways. Some tell us when to wake up, or when to sleep. Others tell us when to be excited, when to scream and run, and when to fall in love. Others tell us when to grow and when to stop growing. Up in your skull, in a small concavity on the sphenoid bone, sits a seemingly unassuming little gland called the pituitary. Now, I could tell you that the pituitary gland is connected to the hypothalamus by the infundibulum, but that would mean nothing to you. All you need to know is that the pituitary gland controls the whole system – and, most importantly, it controls your growth.’
Randolph raised his hand again but, instead of hitting Algar, he stroked his brother’s slimy cheek.
‘When you are young, your pituitary gland sends out growth hormones that worm their way into your cells and tell them to divide and multiply, and when their work is done other hormones come along and tell the cells to stop. Are you following me?’
‘I had hoped to have left school lessons behind for the holidays,’ said James, trying to appear uninterested but concentrating hard so as to glean any clues he could about his fate.
‘But this is fascinating stuff, Bond. Fascinating,’ said Randolph, his face alive with emotion. ‘Just imagine what can happen when the system goes wrong and becomes unbalanced. A child can be born a dwarf, or he can grow into a giant, he can become immensely fat… or immensely strong. Well, that got me thinking – what if we were able to manipulate the endocrine system ourselves? What if we could control the hormones and tell the muscles to grow? Tell the bones to grow?’
Randolph turned excitedly to his brother, who looked at him through his dull, bulging eyes.
‘That was the area we were fascinated by, wasn’t it, Algie? Hmm? So what did we do? We set about studying glands and the different types of hormones: amines, peptides, proteins and steroids.’
‘Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?’ said James. ‘Or are you just showing off that you know a lot of clever stuff?’
‘Be quiet,’ snapped Hellebore. ‘You won’t be able to understand half of this. Just so long as some of it sinks in.’
Dr Friend interrupted. ‘We have been looking into ways of synthesising hormones, making our own versions, extracting them, combining them, altering them…’
Randolph took up the story again.
‘Our idea,’ he said, his voice crackling with excitement, ‘was to turn an ordinary man into a superman.’
James looked at Algar. He stood there, breathing with difficulty through his ruined nose, snot dripping down and mixing with the saliva that hung from his mouth in a thick rope.
‘Well, you failed,’ he said quietly.
‘No!’ yelled Randolph, slamming his hand down on to the table and rattling the cutlery. ‘At first the experiment appeared to have been a huge success. After the initial injections, Algar began to grow, to become stronger, and he felt so healthy and energetic he used to describe it as a feeling of tremendous power raging inside him, as if he had swallowed a lightning bolt. So I increased the dosage… but it was then that things started to go wrong. His mind became hazy, he became forgetful and clumsy, awful spasms shook his body. He complained of headaches and muscular pains, and slowly we realised that he was changing, physically altering. We had somehow upset his endocrine system. His musculature had become monstrous. His bones were growing at an alarming rate and the illness developed into a form of acromegaly. His skull widened, his skin thickened, his thyroid gland was destroyed, his vocal cords ruined. His saliva glands and his sweat glands became overactive and terrible rages gripped him. In the end we had to have him sedated. But, with a series of injections and treatment over the years, I have been able to calm him. And now? You’re as gentle as a lamb, aren’t you, Algie?’
Randolph patted Algar on top of his slimy, hairless head.
‘Tonight we found him carrying you across the hallway, Bond. He almost got away.’
‘What do mean?’ said James.
‘He wasn’t trying to harm you, Bond. He was trying to help you – the poor fool – to rescue you, to take you away from this place.’
‘But why?’
‘There was a previous time, another boy. Algar rescued him from drowning in the loch.’
‘Alfie Kelly.’
‘Yes. A big round of applause for the boy! Your theory proved correct after all, Bond. Algar brought Alfie to me, to nurse him, but we had other plans.’
‘We needed a human being,’ said Dr Friend casually, wiping his spectacles on his lab coat.
James felt his throat tighten and his head pounded as he tried to take in the full implication of what Dr Friend had said.
A strange whine escaped from Algar’s blubbery lips.
James looked from one brother to the other, and he knew which one was the monster. Not the ugly, misshapen one, the one who had become deformed and difficult to look at, but the other one, the handsome one, with his golden hair, his bristling moustache, his clear, tanned skin, perfect white smile and china-blue eyes.
In the process of their experiments, one had gained humanity and the other had lost it.
‘Take him away, MacSawney,’ said Randolph, ‘and lock him up in one of the pens. We can’t risk him interfering again.’
The squat gillie waddled over and gleefully prodded Algar in the back with his gun. Algar hobbled away, and Randolph wiped his fingers on a cloth, before straightening his hair and preening himself in the glass of a fish tank. He then took a small silver box from his pocket, opened it, tapped out two tiny white pills into his palm and tipped them into his mouth. He swallowed.
‘You think we’ve failed?’ he said, approaching James and rubbing his hands together. ‘Quite the opposite. We are nearly there. Already we have developed pills that increase the body’s capabilities.’
‘That’s what you gave to George, didn’t you?’ said James. ‘I saw you at the sports day.’
‘George had been taking the pills for some time. He refuses now, but then… They made him stronger and faster. The cup was to be my first triumph. Of course, there were the usual side effects: increased aggression, a short temper, a small loss of intelligence. But that is of no consequence, and in a soldier would all be admirable qualities.’
‘You did that to your own son?’
‘Why not,’ shouted Randolph angrily, ‘if it had made him win?’
‘But he didn’t win, did he?’ said James. ‘Because you’d sent him crazy. What with the false starts, and trying to attack me on the cross-country…’
‘Be silent! He didn’t win because he is fundamentally weak. As you can see, I take the pills myself, and they do me no harm. They keep me like this. A perfect physical specimen.’
‘You’re not worried that you will slowly turn into your brother?’
‘My brother was a fool. He tested the serum before it was perfected, and in too high a dose. Our concoctions are enormously powerful. They can turn a snivelling coward into a hero with the heart of a lion, they can turn a feeble weakling into a Hercules with the body of a bull – why, they could even turn a woman into a man.’
‘And what did they turn Algar into?’
‘What does he look like to you? My wretched brother?’
‘I don’t know,’ said James miserably. He just wanted this night to be over. He wanted to be back at the cottage, in his own bed. He wanted to be safe.
‘Look!’ Randolph exclaimed, and he pointed at the eel in the tank. ‘An eel! Algar has become an eel. It’s uncanny, isn’t it? The resemblance.’
‘How can you talk like that?
’ James shouted. ‘How can it not affect you? You’re crazy. You’re all crazy!’
‘Scientists are not like other people,’ said Dr Friend calmly. ‘Algar was a scientist, a pure scientist. He saw beyond today, beyond our insignificant little lives. He understood that the end justifies the means. History will prove us right.’
He stopped and cleaned his spectacles for the hundredth time.
‘People aren’t important,’ he went on, ‘it’s what they leave behind that matters. Look at the great artworks of Renaissance Italy, paid for by murderous villains. Nobody remembers their victims, but everybody marvels at the paintings and the sculptures and fine buildings. The great doctors of old were considered monsters for experimenting on dead bodies, but now they are heroes!’
‘There’s a difference,’ said James, ‘between experimenting on dead bodies and experimenting on live ones.’
‘It is academic,’ said Dr Friend.
‘This is the perfect site for a factory, you know, Bond,’ said Randolph. ‘Just as it was the perfect site for a castle, directly over a freshwater spring on an inaccessible island in a lake. Loch Silverfin. You know the legend? It’Airgid? The big fish that ate all the little fish? The biggest, toughest fish of them all. Silverfin. Seemed like an apt name for my project. Especially as this lake has played such an important part. For some time we have been pouring all our waste into it: failed serum, the dead bodies of animals we had experimented on, the blood that is daily sluiced out of this place, all manner of waste chemicals and drugs. It all goes into the lake, where the greedy eels devour the lot. And do you know what happened? In a remarkably short time it started to get into their systems. Because they are so primitive, so tough, they thrived on it, and their nature changed. Ordinarily, an eel is not a hugely aggressive creature. Oh, it’s true they are ruthless and uncaring, but they’re not sharks, they’re not barracuda, their teeth are not sharp, they’re little more than grinding plates. Once they bite on something, it’s the very devil to make them let go as they try to screw the flesh loose, but they’re not dangerous to humans. They eat leeches, nymphs, shrimp; they’ll eat the fresh corpse of almost anything, although they’re rather fussy about stale meat; but they’re not really fearsome predators. Not usually. Our waste, however, turned the placid local eels into killers – bloodthirsty, ferocious and unstoppable. Yes, my drugs were turning them into the sort of fighting machines that I had been trying to create. So I speeded up the process, pumping the water full of drugs, then trapping the eels and removing from them what I needed. They have endocrine systems, like any vertebrate. Their glands are easy enough to extract.’