In an attempt to make this story manageable, I have broken it down into chapters, so it doesn't read as one page as long as a football field. Use these buttons to navigate through the chapters, and don't be fooled by the fact that Chapter 13 is called "The End". This story is 14 chapters long!
WRATH * IX * WRATH
Strike Two
The place where the Succubus had been destroyed was like a bleeding ulcer in the spiritual world. A tight cluster of pain and anguish and suffering. It was like the beacon of a lighthouse, brilliantly showing the path to the Shapeshifter's target.
Death, an omnipresent voice in the Shapeshifter's conscious said, "The Succubus has failed."
"I will not fail," replied the Shapeshifter. He was confident. The Succubus' strength and abilities were insignificant when compared to his own. The Succubus' limitation was in its physical form; as a being of shifting liquid, he was impossible to contain or damage.
"You must be careful. The man, Greggory, has surrounded himself with weapons and powerful allies."
"Allies," spat the Shapeshifter. "Who can possibly keep him protected from Death?"
"Eliphaz."
At that the Shapeshifter gave lengthy pause. Eliphaz? he wondered. What interest did he have in the matter? Why should he be trying to preserve the man's life? But still, "I will not fail," the Shapeshifter repeated.
The Shapeshifter moved, like liquid, rolling oil, towards his target.
He considered the defenses of Castle Greggory. They were weak. There were a million ways inside.
* * *
Preston Garritt had just come off perimeter duty, and, as usual, nothing had happened. He and Morris, his duty-partner had done their routine in almost complete silence that day. Eight hours, six, mundane uneventful laps around the estate, and hardly a word spoken between them. The problem was they'd just about run out of things to talk about. Movies, basketball, O.J. Simpson, football, cars, TV shows, Pamela Anderson Lee, motorcycles, hell's angels, girlfriends and ex-wives, labor unions, lawyers and politicians, baseball, and the mob. What else was there? It was getting hard to come up with something that hadn't already been said. Which is to say that neither of them was intellectually inclined, and neither trusted the other the way he would a true friend yet. So the usual duty was beginning to become an awkward thing. The end of a shift was something Preston was always looking fondly forward to.
He went to the shower first, where he would clean off the sweat of the labor of his last eight hours and perform his daily masturbation ritual. He had fantasies about Baywatch women. He would lather and fondle himself and pretend his hands were Pam or Yasmine's.
When the "funny" water hit him, it shook him from a very focused, dream-like state. It felt like someone had replaced his supply of water with gelatin, thick and gooey. He said, "What the --?" and his eyelids snapped open like retracting roller-blinds (his eyes had been closed up until that point, it being easier to imagine the texture and pliability of Pamela's lips and breasts against a black background).
There was a gray-blue slime coming from the shower-head, irregular, in spurts, like it was forced by ejaculation. The slime was rolling off his body in globs that left short sticky trails, they looked like slithering tadpoles on his chest and thighs.
He bent over to turn the water off, taking one knob in each hand. He cranked them down all the way, but still the shower head spat. The slime was getting everywhere. He had a lot of it in his hair, and it felt like glue there. He swore and struck his fist against the tile wall. It made a deep bass thud.
He grabbed for his towel.
Preston noticed, with little interest, that the sludge was collecting in clumps around the rim of the shower drain, instead of being washed down it. While he was watching, he saw several clumps grow to the size of apples, and then the apples all grew together and they were, combined, as big as a basketball.
He was thinking, It's toxic waste. I've got some kind of nuclear coolant run- off on my body. Heavy water or something. My skin is probably going to melt. Images of the toxic waste scene from Robocop came, uninvited, to his mind. He began to towel off with the kind of grim intensity no one ever expects to see someone towel off with.
But the slime wasn't wiping off. Instead, it rolled together, rather like bread dough, and soon his body was, all over, dangling with strings of the stuff. He tried to pull the strings off but they didn't want to let go, they seemed to wind and coil around his arms and legs and feet and wrists like living things.
The sight of a hopelessly entangled fly in a spider's web came to Preston's mind, but he forced the thought away. He wasn't going to let himself panic.
He looked into the shower stall.
The basketball had grown.
The shape in the tub was now the size of a ten-to-twelve year old child. And it was reaching for him. A glistening, wet, dripping, tentacle was extending towards him; a thick rope of gelatinous ooze.
Preston backed away from the groping tendril. Back-pedaled until he met up with the shower-room door, and the doorknob was pressed awkwardly into his left buttock.
He prayed. For the first time in more than a decade, Preston prayed.
He said, in a voice just barely louder than a whisper, "Heavenly God, please don't let that thing touch me -- in Jesus' name, don't let that thing touch me. Amen."
In His defense, God probably had other things to concentrate on; maybe the prayers of the faithful or something.
The tentacle grabbed Preston by the balls. It not only went so far as to touch him, it touched him in the place he least would've liked to have been touched by a slimy, groping, alien, tentacle thing. All the ropes and strands that hung from Preston's body came vigorously to life then. They all joined together and cemented, and became part of the same living net. Then they began to squeeze. It was like the hold of a synchronized team of boa constrictors.
Up until that moment, Preston thought the pain in his throbbing testicles was probably the most extreme he could experience. He was wrong. By a long shot, he was wrong. He opened his mouth to scream, but before the sound of his terror came out, one of the smaller threads from the net wormed its way in. In fact, all over his body, he suddenly became aware of the loose ends of the net, probing over his body.
They were searching for orifices.
Eventually, they found several: his ears and nostrils, his anus, his urethra...
And they climbed inside him. Slithering, struggling, forcing themselves into his body along their various discovered paths. Then, the ends of those burrowed tentacles blossomed, like flowers, but with hooks and barbs instead of petals. And miraculously, Preston was still conscious when they began to tear him apart from the inside out.
Preston's body went down the shower drain. None of the pieces remaining of him were even big enough to cause a partial blockage of the pipes. He was flushed cleanly.
* * *
In the hallway outside the shower-room, the Shapeshifter found a laundry cart. He was able to conceal himself there before anyone caught sight of him.
* * *
Greggory had cloned skin cells before; one of the things he had envisioned on his prosthetic limb designs for Biotech was an outer layer of spongy, relaxed-muscle consistency tissues with a layer of synthetically grown skin covering it. A limb that not only looked real, but felt real.
The problem he encountered this time around was much the same as he had encountered then: the life span of the skin cells, once removed from their source of nourishment -- be it a body or the incubator tray -- was extremely short. Cloning skin cells and then growing new sheets of flesh was a technique specifically developed to help severe burn victims. Skin has only to survive on its own from the time it leaves the tray it was grown in, till the time it is grafted onto the new host's body. At most an hour or two. His situation here was completely different. Eliphaz had commissioned him to construct a cage of skin. And by Greggory's calculations, the most they could hope for, after constructing the cage, was about two days of life: the skin would begin to die almost immediately, but it would take two days for the transition to total death and a state of inorganic existence to be attained. By Greggory's reasoning, such an effort as that which he was now expending was hardly worth it for just two days. As a ratio, two over eternity is such a small portion that it doesn't even merit mentioning.
Greggory told Eliphaz, "At the very best, I'm figuring this is only going to hold up for one and a half, maybe two, days. This isn't going to work."
Eliphaz regarded him with more than just slight irritation. He kept rubbing his right temple -- he'd been suffering from headaches ever since that night on the roof with the Succubus. He said, "Two days gives us thinking time. Time to come up with a more permanent organic fixture. And a cage is more easily portable and accessible than anything else I've been able to come up with. Build it Greggory. Let me worry about what to do with it later."
Then the technician came in. He was wearing a white lab coat that had several tiny screwdrivers in the right breast pocket. He said, by way of explaining his intrusion, "Your processors are over-heated again."
"Fantastic," said Eliphaz.
"They're just plain old over-worked," said the technician. He adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose with his thumb. "You have too many active parameters in your security algorithms. You're requiring the computer to check too many things all at once."
"So what would you suggest?"
The technician seemed pleased that he was being asked for his advice. He stood up straighter as he spoke his reply. "Well," he said, even his voice a little bigger than it had been. "You're already using the fastest, most capable micro-processor available, outside of the ones that use bullet-switches, and those have only been maintained in laboratory conditions and for such short periods of time they would be of no use to you here --"
"What would you suggest?" Eliphaz, clearly not interested in any discussion of technocratic possibilities.
"I'd suggest using a simpler security check program."
"Such as?"
"Such as one that skips objects on radar that are smaller than a car -- or have it skip the grounds search by temperature. Maybe you could arrange for it to check half of the security cameras and motion sensors on one pass, and have it check the other half on the next pass; alternating back and forth. A modification like that is only going to cost you a fraction of a second of security at the most, and it will drastically reduce the number of computation cycles per second."
"None of those are viable options. You're talking fractions of a second -- what you perceive as a couple of minor holes in security. What I'm talking about is life and death."
The technician decided to try a different tact. He said, "Your perimeter defense system recorded five 'aggressive enemy penetrations' by sparrows yesterday."
"And your point is?"
"Your computer shot them down with remote-guided ground to air missiles. Isn't that a bit extreme? Your security is overkill! You don't need a defense program to shoot down sparrows and robins!"
Eliphaz, already irritable, was nearly shaking with rage when he spoke next. "Listen," he said, and his voice came out shockingly soft. "Overkill in your book is just routine safety assurance in mine. If our micro-processor could handle the load, I'd have it taking regular spectrum analysis samples of the air and water that comes into this building, and I'd have it alert me anytime it found so much as an extra molecule of nitrogen. I'd want to know about temperature dropping one tenth of a degree in the far corner of the southwestern quadrant. So tell me -- how do I keep security up and running and keep my computers from burning out?"
For a second the technician looked like he was about ready to weep. His lower lip quivered. Eliphaz knew he wanted to shout something to the effect of Scotty's: "Ye canno' break the laws of physics Kepten!" The technician was a Star Trekker. He hadn't come out and said so, but Eliphaz knew. Even without reading his mind. With Trekkers you can always tell.
But the tech somehow managed to keep it all together. He said, "We could try a better cooling system. Like liquid nitrogen. Super cold. We'd need to replace the coolant liquids a lot, like every couple of days or so, but it could work." He didn't sound very hopeful though.
"Beautiful," said Eliphaz. "Get us one of those. Have it installed by tonight. Then check on getting us a couple more of these processor systems. If one super-computer can't make me feel secure, maybe a network of them can."
"A network?"
"Yes. Have that ready by early next week. Money is no concern remember. Now go. Get me that cooling system."
The technician saluted, turned, and left.
Money talks.
Greggory looked up from his task. "The computer is down?"
"Only some of the details. I'm compensating by having the guards on yellow alert. We should be all right until the new cooling system is in place. No need for you to be so concerned. Don't let anything distract you. Make me that skin."
Then Eliphaz went too. And Greggory was alone again, except for Sabre.
"He's not too demanding or anything, is he, boy?"
Sabre panted in reply; wagged his tail.
* * *
Castle Greggory, as the name would seem to imply, was originally built mostly of stone. It had been wired for electricity during its museum days. During that time, a few sections on the fourth floor, well out of sight of museum visitors, were redone with plaster, drywall, carpeting, linoleum and fluorescent fixtures. That was the office section of the museum: it looked like the interior of any other commercial building. It was during that first remodeling that one of the contractors approached the museum curator, a man who had once been knighted, Sir Henry Ives (and that was what you called him: Sir), and reported on the condition of many of the original structure's support timbers. And what he had to say was not good.
The contractor was able to point out several areas on one floor beam where the wood looked damp and rotten, like a musty old rope gone to fraying. "See that?" he asked.
"I have eyes," said Sir Henry Ives. He always intended for his voice to sound smug, obnoxious and intellectually superior. He rarely ever failed. He did not fail then.
"That's termite infestation. Or was, at any rate."
"Well then, gas the little bastards." Sir Henry Ives was not a patient man, and he hated to be called upon to point out the obvious.
"Well, they're already gone," the contractor cleared his throat, "Sir," and he seemed nearly to choke on the word. "Maybe one of the previous owners had them taken care of, I don't know. The point is not the termites though, the point is the damage that's been done. Now I don't suppose I need to remind you that most of this castle is sold rock. And I don't suppose I need to remind you of how heavy solid rock is. What you probably need, is to know that my estimate on repairs -- extensive rebuilding -- is 750 grand."
"That's three quarter of a million dollars!"
"You are a smart guy."
"That's an outrage!"
The contractor shrugged.
"We can hardly justify keeping the museum open as it is. There's no way I can afford that!"
"Then I'm afraid I'll have to let the building inspector know. He'll have the building condemned you know. No question about it. And the fact that this is a public building, that's been operating normally while its been so near to collapse -- well, you'll probably find yourself facing some kind of civil action lawsuit as well."
Later that afternoon, Sir Henry Ives was saved by a call from a real estate agent representing the interests of one Mr. Eliphaz Montrego.
Sir Henry Ives said, "Isn't he that crazy man?"
And the real estate agent said, "Yes, but his money is still sane."
Of course the fact that the castle was to be legally condemned unless repairs and rebuilding were done was brought to Eliphaz' attention before the sale was final, but it didn't phase him at all. He said, "I had every intention of remodeling. My offer still stands."
When Eliphaz had the place rebuilt, he had nearly every timber replaced, and when he did replace them, it was with steel girders. It took away a lot of the building's Old World style and charm, but Eliphaz' concerns were not with style and charm.
Nearly every timber was replaced.
Nearly.
Ironically, one of the timbers left over was one of those which most needed replacing: a floor timber on the fourth floor which had been hollowed out by termites which had selected that particular beam for a home. On the outside, the beam looked perfect: there was no warping, no splintering, no sagging, no rot. But on the inside, it was as empty as a donut hole. Also ironic was the fact that nearly directly below that beam was Greggory's bed, and nearly directly above that beam was a super-computer having a weighty compressor pump for a liquid-nitrogen based cooling system installed in it.
And in the spirit of great tragedy and human disaster, and Murphy's Law, it was also that beam that the technician, Ron Brakes, decided to drill through when he found out he was going to have to wire the compressor pump on a separate circuit. It wasn't that going through that floor beam made the most sense which prompted him to make such a decision. It was the fact that it was the quickest way to get the job done -- and he was just forty minutes away from his midnight deadline.
But adding the compressor, like another straw on the old, worn camel's back, was not what brought the floor down, and neither was Ron's drilling through that beam to insert electrical conduit. It was the steady vibration of the pump itself, like a natural harmonic, which ultimately caused the crash.
It was 11:51 when Ron powered the pump up. It was 11:53 when Ron injected the liquid nitrogen into the system. It was 12:02, the wee minutes of a brand new day, when the floor collapsed... and saved Greggory's life.
* * *
It was a quarter to midnight when Greggory left the lab, Sabre following closely on his heels. His new patch of skin was about the size of a dollar bill, but by tomorrow morning, having been fed the proper growth stimulants and then laid to rest in the loving and nurturing environment of the incubator, it would be the size of a large pizza.
He went upstairs and to bed. His bed-chamber was right on the other side of Brad Cunning's night post. Anyone attempting to enter his room would have to go through Brad first. When Greggory passed through, Brad had his hand on the stock of his AK- 47 which rested on his lap. His other hand was holding the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. Michael Jordan was on the front.
"Hey, Greggory."
"Good evening Brad. Anything exciting today?"
"Same old same old, man." He didn't even look up from his magazine. "No phantoms. No floating chainsaws. I did feel cold once today, but it turned out to be from the air conditioning." It would be another eleven hours before someone would report Preston AWOL.
Greggory stepped into his bed-chamber, took his robe off, and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. Nearby was a full length mirror, in which Greggory took a moment to notice his body. He felt a brief sting, in his mechanical heart, remembering what he had sacrificed for his achievement: the abilities to feel by touching, and taste. Of course he had no use for eating, so loss of the sense of taste meant little to him. But touch -- he remembered his girlfriend from high school, Angela Vows, and what running his fingers through her hair used to be like. And making love to her... he'd given up all that too.
He remembered his coming to terms with his goals: live everlastingly in exchange for a couple of tactile sensations. It had seemed so fair at the time.
He remembered the main operation. He'd meditated, using a technique as it had been described in Eliphaz' book, and when he had achieved a state of mental weightlessness, he'd picked up a scalpel in one of his rubber-gloved hands, and, guided by a mirror mounted on the ceiling above him, made his first incision: from the hollow of his throat to a point just below his navel. He felt discomfort, but no real pain. It was like watching an operation on TV; PBS. With a bone saw, he cut through his breast plate, and with a plier-like prying device, he opened his rib cage. He would never over-come the awesome fascination inspired by the workings of the human heart an lungs. He must've watched himself, his grand machine, L'Homme Machine, puppet of the gods', for hours before finally shaking himself from his reverie and continuing with the operation. His first step was his most dangerous: removing his heart and connecting himself to the external pump and respirator which would act as his heart and lungs during the course of the operation. He'd already primed all the tubing and connectors with a blood-safe plasma expander. After actually separating his heart from the rest of his body, he'd have only about a minute to connect himself to the external machines. After a minute, he'd start to get foggy in the head, even in his trance, and even if he somehow could manage beyond a minute, the odds were good that his brain would suffer some kind of permanent damage from oxygen deprivation.
He remembered that first cut. Snip, and the aorta was severed, and it was like stepping out onto a bridge that would burn behind him as he crossed it. He knew there was no turning back.
His hands were guided by the mirror. In preparation for this event, Greggory had dismantled and assembled an old mechanical pocketwatch, several times, watching only a mirror in which he could see a reflection of his hands. He'd heard or read somewhere once, that that procedure was a fairly accurate simulation of what life with a severe dyslexia disorder was like, but dyslexics be damned, he managed to adapt and do quite well.
When he'd drawn out the outline for his surgical procedures, he'd calculated a five second margin of error into the steps necessary to get himself connected to the blood- pump. But it turned out he didn't even need that five extra seconds. His trance-steady hands moved like machines on an assembly line: fast and precise. He did it with still four seconds left from the original time allotted. He'd made it through the tough part, the rest was just endurance.
The rest of the operation took twenty-five hours and thirty-seven minutes. He removed each piece of himself, liver, lungs, pancreas, and did one of two things with it: either discarding it completely and replacing it with a more efficient machine, or modifying the existing part with enhancements of vinyl, plastic and stainless, surgical steel.
When he was done inside he began work on the outside; replacing the shield of his body's skin with a puncture resistant, self-repairing, layer of rubberized foam which was lined on the inside with a micro-thin glaze of molybdenum-titanium alloy. His new skin was built, flush, onto a frame around his body, that held each panel of flesh in place with four tiny, malleable bolts. If one section of his body was damaged, therefore, it would be easy to swap it for an interchangeable part. The important thing being that a stock of parts was always maintained.
Twenty-five and a half hours.
Afterwards, he'd slept for fifteen hours straight, awaking to find himself in exactly the same position he had set off to slumber in. Now, when he slept, he slept like death: as a stone. Not a toss, not a turn, not a fidget or a wink. His body, naturally, no longer had any use for sleep, but there were still certain reactions, chemicals and functions of the brain that went helter-skelter if he deprived himself of it. He had plans for eliminating that mortal weakness in the future, but for now it had to be that way: his plans required insight and technique that he did not yet possess. But all of life is learning; eventually he knew he would come by the knowledge he required.
And his first operation had not been his only one. It turned out that his original apparatus for sealing his eyes was faulty and leaked and needed immediate attention. Indeed, every second his faulty visual protection devices were in place he felt he could feel minutes of his life span shooting out of them like Superman's heat vision. And confound it! Operating on one's own eyes was difficult work! As each one was disconnected from its nerve stem in turn, the depth perception, which was the benefit of binocular vision, went, and much of his surgical proceedings then needed to rely heavily on the touch of his fingers in order to judge distance and scale.
The eventual solution for the predicament of his eyes included the removal of much of the structure of his skull, about the area of the eye sockets, in order to make room for a sort of miniature aquarium in which he housed his original spheres. Someday he looked forward to the invention of cybernetically conjoined nervous-optic systems which would allow the replacement of those notoriously fragile organii; until then, machines would lack the clarity, quickness and smoothness of a real eye.
Overall, evolution had performed decently enough in developing the human machine, but still, it was a system, the creation of which had been governed by chance. Doubtless, careful thought and consideration could improve on it.
Greggory stepped back from the mirror. There was no time for such weak-minded sentimentality. What was done was done now, and, with a face towards the future, what lay ahead was all struggling, and a battle up hill, and against the odds. Besides. There were no regrets on his part. He was proud of what he had achieved; wits and determination, like mighty muscles flexed in the face of the spectre of death. If he had the chance to do it all again, he would. No question about it. No more thoughts of Angela Vows.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light, he thought. Not a bit like his complacent, accepting father. The only thing inescapable, it turns out, is taxes.
The ceiling above him creaked and settled. Nothing unusual there. The castle was always creaking and settling: the floor was always shifting beneath the feet of a thousand spectral memories, shambling as ghosts.
He pulled back the sheets and climbed into bed...
...and climbed right into the embrace of the Shapeshifter.
It was 11:58.
* * *
Eliphaz understood the fragile mechanics of chance and coincidence. He knew how often it was that catastrophe was not only spoken about, but actually occurred. He knew tragedy was common, and, as such, fully expected he should have his fair share. If it happened to other people, why shouldn't it happen to him?
If he had seen, beforehand, how many intricate movements and timings were going to be necessary to stop the Shapeshifter, he would've said it was impossible. He would've thrown in the towel even before the bell for the first round had rung. But afterwards, even having lost both of his legs, he was not beyond smiling when he thought of the absurdity of it all.
He was in the whirlpool hot tub when it happened; figuring a good thorough meditation and relaxation in the soothing, warm water would be just the thing for his headache. He'd never even had a headache before, now here he was, wincing from the impact of a full-blown migraine. It felt like there was a bull loose in the china shop of his brain: throbbing, snorting, smashing. His head throbbed and groaned.
He didn't feel that stressed or anything, but surely that was the root cause of it all: stress.
Relax, he told himself. Relax.
It was exactly 12:00. Midnight.
* * *
Relaxing was just what the Shapeshifter gave Greggory time to do after he climbed into bed. It gave him two minutes to get settled. And then...
It struck.
There was no time for Greggory to dodge the blow... there was no time for him to think about what was happening. He wouldn't even begin to comprehend what had happened until it was all over with: two and a half minutes later.
All he knew at the beginning was that his sheets seemed to be tucked in awful tight.
For the Shapeshifter was already there. Already within touching distance of him. Already making contact.
* * *
It hadn't been part of the original plan, but sometimes chance provides in ways better than anyone could possibly anticipate. The laundry cart the Shapeshifter had smuggled itself away in after exiting the showers turned out to be full of bed-linens. And it just so happened that day, that all the rooms on the third floor were due for a change of sheets. The Shapeshifter, totally by the accord of fate, wound up being taken right into Greggory's room; it didn't have to go wandering around looking for his room, risking being seen, or anything. What a stroke of luck! And not only that, in the process of simply doing his job, the servant that removed the old bed-covers further gave the Shapeshifter the perfect disguise and opportunity. Double luck!
But then Luck played a couple of cards for the Shapeshifter's opponent as well.
* * *
Greggory's thoughts went quickly from discomfort, at the tightness of the sheets around his feet, to all-out suffocating panic.
The trapped, restrained feeling of his feet was only a point by which he started to track the progress. The stifling embrace of the blankets was suddenly stronger and even more encompassing: first it had his feet, then his knees, then his waist, then his arms.
One pause on his way to sheer terror; Greggory had time to think, What the hell? and then blankets and sheets and pillowcases were wrapping and twining around his head. He tried to yell, but already, many muffling layers and folds were around the speaker in his throat and his only sound was like the buzz of a humming-bird's wings. Not nearly enough to draw Brad.
Formless, desperate thoughts clouded his mind. Senseless, disorganized: Dark... Good Lord... trapped... can't move... Happening? What is... where am... dark... move... happening?... I am... dark... where? He was only dimly aware of being lifted; picked up in the arms of those blankets, and moved.
The Shapeshifter flipped him over, bent him, Greggory was like a posable action figure in its grip. It turned him one way, and then the other, searching for an entrance to him, and then, failing that, searching for a way to gain enough leverage for twisting and breaking him.
It locked its grip around his head and face, texturing itself, so the friction of its hold was increased by sharp ridges, like the teeth in pliers. Then, violent, fast, it wrenched Greggory's head around -- spun it like a top -- and if Greggory would've still had a neck and spine of but conventional design, surely he would've perished. But he had foreseen, and designed a counter to, nearly every limitation of human motion posed by the body. His titanium alloy skeleton could move like putty if need be, and in the grip of the Shapeshifter, indeed it did need.
The Shapeshifter was puzzled by the range of Greggory's mobility and resilience. His body seemed to somehow adapt to every new contortion the Shapeshifter put him through. The Shapeshifter eventually resolved to tie him in a knot and then pull on his arms until they popped from their sockets.
It twisted him. It turned.
Greggory, in his bed, looked like a man caught in a taffy pulling machine.
Still, all that conflict went by noiseless except for the faint buzzing of Greggory's stifled screams.
It went on for two and a half, eternal-seeming, minutes. And then, just as the Shapeshifter had gotten itself positioned for the delivering of the coup de grace...
Those ghostly creakings of the floor above suddenly gave way to the thunderous crash of a much greater settling.
Down came the rotting timber, rent by vibration; and down came the huge stone tile that timber supported; down came the compressor, snapping free from its circuit of cooling tubes and its power supply; and down too, the computer itself. Down it all came, right down on top of Greggory's bed and the two strugglers -- or at least on one hospital corner of one of the combatants.
And the weight and strain of the crash was so great not even the newly-enforced floor of Greggory's room could support it. That floor creaked and shattered and broke too, and the crash continued to rain down, like a collapse in a mine shaft, gaining mass and intensity as it went.
The Shapeshifter and Greggory, still on the bed, rode down the avalanche as a two-man toboggan, sledding on the mattress.
The floor below went too. Like one more in a chain of dominoes, and the whole climaxing pillar of debris went down again, unhindered, into the remodeled dungeon -- the very recreation room that saw Eliphaz relaxing in the hot tub.
By that time, in the uproar and confusion, the Shapeshifter had all but completely lost its hold on Greggory. So when Greggory took it upon himself to lunge side-long off the bed, the fact of his coming clean free was a source of no major wonder. The Shapeshifter tried to maintain his grip, but, tucked in under the corner of the mattress as he was, the pulling weight yanked him loose of his tenebrous hold on Greggory's ankle, and down he went, to the finish of the fall.
Down, down, down.
Crash and thunder. It sounded like the castle was being dynamited.
Boom, thud! and finally, splash!
Thrown forward at the end, like a man traveling through the windshield at the conclusion of a moving collision, the Shapeshifter snapped loose of his mooring under the mattress and slapped down in the hot tub like a flabby belly, flopping.
The whole collapse had come down right in front of Eliphaz at about the distance he would watch TV from. And certainly, it was as interesting a show as he had ever seen. All those happenings held him, fascinated, as he sat there, waist deep in the water, a look of semi-amused shock and surprise on his face.
Then the Shapeshifter landed in the tub next to him, and he snapped back to his senses.
He said, "Holy --" but that was as far as his exclamation went.
For then, like the tail following behind an icy comet, the rain came. And those pelting drops weren't just merely cold -- they were freezing.
They were liquid nitrogen.
From the ruptured, rent coils of the cooling system, three stories up, they, those frosty drops, came falling. Rain. It wasn't torrential. It wasn't like a downpour or anything. But it was enough.
Enough to turn the hot tub to ice; freeze it up like a cube in a tray -- and enough to do it fast too.
The first couple of drops hit the frothing water and created curious snowballs in a radius around them. In the blink of an eye, the waters of the hot tub were turned to slush. Then: blink, and it was solid. Blink, blink: and it was, every bit, a brittle block of arctic fury cold.
So it was that when Eliphaz, his shout stopped up in his throat, made his frenzied attempt to back-pedal away from his sudden-appeared enemy, the lower half of his body was already as harshly frozen and crystal as the rose a magician dips and breaks for effect on stage. And like that shattering bloom, he too broke. He broke himself free of the frozen hot tub right at the waist; left his legs, like popsicle sticks in a juice mold, behind.
His alarm was severe indeed, for a second.
Then, again, he had firm reign on his mind, and he was reeling his shock and panic in. He could stand to lose his legs. He could stand to have his body separated, and his innards trailing between the halves like raw, glistening streamers. He didn't really need all that blood, which was a pool -- no -- a veritable ocean, spreading out around him.
I'm no longer reliant on my body, he told himself, reeling in the panic, fighting down the fear, blocking out the thought of the pain which so made him feel like he was burning alive...
I have elevated. I'm like a presence: mental energies. The power of thought. I don't need to eat or sleep or breathe, he reasoned. I don't need this body to exist. This is just a flesh wound. Just like the arm. I don't need my legs.
Sure enough, as soon as he had regained control of himself -- aired the trauma- cloud out of his thoughts -- things seemed to get pretty much back to normal. He wasn't losing consciousness or anything. And by the look of it there couldn't possibly be any blood left for him to lose.
See, see, he thought. I told you so. Pure thought. Energy.
So he tore himself free of his trailing intestine; tied it off in a knot, and began to drag himself away from the site of the calamity.
Guards were, by then, on their way down. He could hear their feet, pounding down stairs and through corridors, above him, around him. The first guard to actually see him did a quick double-take and then passed out. Eliphaz dragged himself, one good arm and one a stump at the elbow, over to the fallen guard and used his walkie- talkie to radio for back-up.
He said, "I'm going to need about ten men with picks, chisels and crowbars to report to the vicinity of the hot tub. We need to pry up an ice block, intact, and get it to the freezer, pronto."
* * *
From there, Eliphaz arranged for a refrigerated cargo plane to fly over the Antarctic and make a special drop, of a tightly sealed crate, over an area, isolated and secluded, where it could be sure no-one would just happen to stumble upon it.
Two down.
And in the aftermath of the Shapeshifter, Eliphaz, then mobile by means of an electric wheelchair, had this to say: "You know Greggory, if this global warming thing starts to get really serious someday, you might want to think about leaving the planet."