Chapter 9: Origin of the Beast
The silence in the car had been a physical thing, a third passenger draped over them both. Lewis drove without a destination, his hands steady on the wheel while his mind reeled. The red mark on his wrist was already fading. He could still feel the ghost of the leather cuff, the heat of her, the surreal counterpoint of her vulnerability afterwards.
“Turn left here,” she said softly, her first words in ten minutes. Her voice was just a scratch in the dark.
He obeyed, moving through a neighborhood of old, craftsman-style houses set back beneath sprawling oak trees. It was a part of town he didn’t know, quiet and established. She pointed to a driveway. “Here.”
The house was dark, a single porch light burning. It looked tidy, unremarkable. He pulled in behind a sensible sedan, cutting the engine. The sudden quiet was immense.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked. He didn’t know what else to say.
She looked at her own hands, folded in her lap. The nails were perfect, lacquered a deep crimson. “No.”
They walked to the front door, the gravel crunching under their feet. She unlocked it and stepped inside, flicking on a light. Lewis followed, expecting… he didn’t know what. A lair. Something that matched the contained violence of her. Instead, he saw a living room that was almost aggressively normal. A worn sofa piled with books, a large television, a cold fireplace. It was messy. Coffee mugs sat on various surfaces, some holding dried-up tea bags. Stacks of journals and student papers covered the coffee table. A single, abstract painting hung slightly crooked on the wall.
“I don’t… have guests,” she said, as if reading his thoughts. She dropped her keys into a ceramic bowl by the door with a clatter. “Make yourself… I’ll make tea.”
He stood awkwardly in the center of the room while she disappeared into the kitchen. The domestic sounds of a running tap, a cabinet opening, felt absurd after where they had just been. He drifted towards the bookshelf. It was mostly academic texts—biochemistry, advanced cellular biology, quantum physics treatises that made his head swim. But tucked among them were worn paperbacks with lurid covers: vintage monster comics, pulp science fiction novels. One title caught his eye: The Chemistry of Self.
“It’s a terrible thesis,” she said from the doorway. She held two steaming mugs. “Undergrad pretension. Sugar?”
“No. Thanks.” He took the mug. She’d changed into a soft-looking hoodie and loose sweatpants. Without her professional armor, she looked younger, and infinitely more tired. The green was entirely gone from her eyes.
She sank into the sofa, tucking her feet underneath her. She blew on her tea. “You have questions.”
He sat on the far end of the couch, leaving a cushion between them. “I have about a million questions.”
“Start with one.”
He took a sip. The tea was bitter, medicinal. “The… the green. What is it?”
A faint, humorless smile touched her lips. “It’s me. A very persistent, very inconvenient version of me.” She stared into her mug. “It started here. Well, not here. In the campus lab. The advanced research facility. I was a post-doc. Brighter than the sun, or so I thought.”
She paused, and her gaze drifted past him, into a memory.
The lab air was always cold, smelling of sharp alcohol and the underlying sweetness of decay. I was running a solo synthesis, a pet project outside my official work. An attempt to catalyze rapid cellular regeneration. Foolish. Arrogant. I’d been awake for thirty-six hours.
The vial slipped. A stupid, mundane accident. It shattered on the floor, the reactive compound aerosolizing instantly. It was in my lungs before I could hold my breath. A searing, citrus-rot taste filled my mouth. I stumbled back, knocking over another rack. A cascade. A beaker of concentrated acidic solution tipped, splashing across my chest and arm.
The pain was… conceptual. A white-hot void. Then the convulsions started. My muscles didn’t just cramp; they seized, then ballooned. I heard the tear of my blouse before I felt it. My skin was on fire, crawling, tightening. I looked down and saw it spreading from the points of contact—a vivid, emeraldgreen, like malachite. It wasn’t a discoloration. It was a transformation. The tissue was denser. I watched a drop of the acid bead up and roll off my new skin, leaving no mark.
I tried to scream. The sound that came out was a guttural, sub-harmonic roar that rattled the glassware on the shelves. The change rippled through me, a wave of agonizing power. My body expanded, contracted, fought itself. When it settled, I was on my hands and knees amidst the broken glass, panting, my ruined clothes hanging off this… this form.
The hunger hit next. Not for food. A deep, cellular ache. A need for release, for the explosive expenditure of the energy now boiling inside me. My mind was a haze of panic and this raw, primal urge.
I saw him then. Lewis. He’d been working late in the adjacent student lab. He must have heard the crash. He was peering through the window in the connecting door, his face a pale moon of shock in the dark. Our eyes met.
And in that moment, a different part of me took over. The professor. The observer. Even through the fury and the fear, I saw a perfect data point. A witness. Would he run? Would he call for help?
I turned my back to him. Deliberately. Let him see the powerful sweep of my green shoulders, the ruin of my clothes. I let out a low, shuddering moan, one hand sliding down my stomach, into the heat between my legs. It was a performance. A grotesque, necessary one. The pleasure was real—a scorching counterpoint to the pain, a way to ground the racing frenzy in my blood. But my mind was cold, clear. I listened for the sound of his retreat. It never came.
When I was done, spent and trembling on the cold linoleum, I looked back at the window. He was still there. Watching. Not with horror. With a fascination that mirrored my own.
She blinked, coming back to the present. To her living room. To Lewis, sitting perfectly still, his tea forgotten.
“You knew,” he whispered. “You knew I was there.”
“Of course I knew.” She took a long sip. “You think I’d lose that much control? I needed to see what you’d do. Most people would have screamed. Fainted. Called the cops.”
“I didn’t.”
“No. You didn’t.” She set her mug down on the cluttered table. “That made you interesting. A control variable in an otherwise chaotic experiment.”
“Is that all I am?” The question came out before he could stop it, raw at the edges.
Professor Rygell looked at him, really looked at him, for what felt like the first time all night. The fierce intelligence was still there, but the cold clinical edge had softened into something more complicated. Weariness. Curiosity. A faint, reluctant need.
“No,” she said finally. The word hung in the air between them, simple and massive. “Not anymore.”
Outside, a car passed by, its headlights painting a slow arc across the ceiling. The normal world was still out there, ticking on. But in this messy, book-strewn living room, something else had been set in motion. A confession. A shared secret that was now a chain linking them, heavier and more real than any restraint from her briefcase.
She leaned forward, her eyes holding his. “The question, Lewis, is what are you going to do now that you know?”