-----
Sitting in the chair in the corner of Marise's room he found himself getting progressively more tired, his eyelids drooping, waking up intermittently to find he'd snoozed fitfully for a few minutes. Then after who knows how long he found himself waking groggily, a trolley being wheeled into the room. And whatever was on the trolley was covered with a sheet, all the way up to the top. Glancing at him only for a second the orderlies back out of the room without saying anything.
Lifting himself from his seat in trepidation, Laurent walked over to the bed. Whatever was under the sheet was small - too small to be a person? He reached for the top of the sheet and pulled it down. Revealing the drawn, ashen-face of Marise Lavigne. Her previously glowing St Joe complexion now an almost colourless grey, every ounce of fat and contour gone, leaving only a sharp, thin face that Laurent hardly recognises. The expression strange, not the emotionless blankness from before, no. A look of satisfaction, of triumph? As though, despite all that had happened to her, Marise had come out on top and she knew it.
Sinking to his knees beside Marise's body, Laurent allows the tears to flow while no one is watching. Silent sobs wrack his chest.
-----
And then Dr Clermont pushes open the door. He's carrying something, it looks to be a large glass jar wrapped in a green surgeon's gown. He places it down on a bedside table. 'I know, I know, mon jeune ami, but we do not have time for that now.' The doctor removes the green cloth covering the jar. Inside it is filled with liquid and Laurent gets the whiff of a pungent odour, chemical, vinegary. 'Formaldehyde,' the doctor says in response to his involuntary expression of disgust.
Inside the jar there is something floating. At first look it seems like a baby, but this impression is soon dispelled. The small body is malformed, a mosaic of aquatic features and human-like appendages. Skin pallid and translucent, a network of thick veins bulging beneath the surface. Webbed hands and sharp claws curled into tiny fists. Glistening gills undulating gently in the fluid, either side of the oversized, misshapen head. The eyes are closed but the dark orbs convey a sense of primal instinct and ancient cunning. Despite being motionless inside the jar, Laurent still senses a palpable aura of malevolence.
As Laurent stands transfixed, Dr Clemont is babbling. 'It is disgusting but fascinating. Many anthropologists are proposing that humans may have lived in the sea at one stage of their development - during the Pliocene drought, keeping cool and finding food. That they went back into the sea after evolving on land, then swam back up the rivers and climbed back into the forests, leaving the ancestors of dolphins and whales behind - it explains certain aspects of the human form, the lack of hair the...but this, well, who's to say that some of the humanoids didn't stay behind? If...well, then that might explain how it could...mate with our own kind despite being so different morphologically...'
The longer the doctor talks about this creature, the more Laurent stares at it. Those bulbous eyes positioned on the sides of the head, no nose to speak of, gaping sharp toothed mouth, frilled gills on the squat neck, compact muscular body, webbed limbs...a hideous mixture of human baby and toad and fish. The longer he looks at it the greater the sense that he knows it. Knows these creatures, that they are familiar to him. And he to them. Prickling down the back his neck, cold sweat across his skin. A shiver running down his spine.
He remembers under the sea, in the cave at Dame Marie, on the road here to Cap Matelot. Those round unblinking eyes, the inhuman intelligence - the look of the predator as it sees its prey.
OOC: Insight roll please |
