The Waking

"It was a November night, two in the morning, rain turning to sleet. The work was done—had been done for a week—and I had not opened the sac, because opening it was the one act I could not perform twice. I want you to understand that at no point had I failed to think about what I was doing. I thought about it the way you think about a wedding you dread. I thought about it constantly and did it anyway.

"I drained the sac. The body came out and stood up.

"Understand: I had built him well. The tissue was sound, the heart was strong, the brain was new but seeded and grown, and the eyes opened on the world with the whole unblinking attention of a newborn. He was tall—my scaffolds had run long—and his proportions were wrong in the way of a thing assembled from itself, the hands too large, the jaw too heavy. Where the sac's panels had met his skin, the seams showed: fine pale ridges, frank and surgical, running his length. His hair was black and fine. His teeth came in white and perfect, and that detail undid me more than the rest of it together. I had made him beautiful in exactly one feature, and I had made it a stranger's feature.

"He looked at me. He did not speak. He had no words yet, only the attention, and the attention had nowhere to go but my face.

"I ran.

"Captain, I have no better account of my cowardice than that. Every fear I had ever read into this work arrived in my body at once—not the fear of science, but the fear of the mirror. I saw the seams. I saw what the world would see, and I ran out of my own laboratory into the sleet like a man escaping a fire, and I left the door unbarred.

"I do not know how long I walked. The city was all sodium light and wet stone. I ended up in a hotel courtyard near the river at dawn, and there I stayed, in the lee of a loading dock, for three weeks, by Danny's count. I was feverish. I remember the courtyard mostly, and pigeons, and a vending machine's hum, and the certainty that the thing in the basement had died in the dark the first night, because nothing so new survives alone.

"Danny found me. He had been looking since my university mail bounced. He sat down in the courtyard, took off his coat, put it around me, and did not ask a single question for four days. When the fever broke I lied to him. I told him I had been ill from overwork. He looked at me for a long moment and said, 'All right,' and I have been paying for that all right ever since.

"I went back to the basement in the spring. The power had been cut for nonpayment months before. The sac was down. There was no body in the room and no body in the logs, and the exterior door, which I remembered unbarred, stood open to an alley. I searched the riverbanks. I put it about that I had destroyed a failed specimen. I believed, because I needed to believe, that the cold had taken him.

"Two years later, a scout troop came down out of the New Hampshire woods without one of its boys."