怪女孩‧蛻變中

The private detective's name was Ralph Dietrick and the credo by which he lived was simple: No case was ever dropped until it was solved. In his 30 years of detecting he'd had his share of strange cases but none stranger than the one that came his way one wet afternoon in late November. A man appeared in his office, rain running down his smooth sallow skin.

Dietrick liked to characterize clients in terms of animals (“There isn't a man born, he'd boast, “who don't resemble an animal if you look at 'em right.”) This one was a lizard: no question. A cold-blooded little squirt of a man, who licked his lips all the time(sure sign of a liar, Dietrick thought) and whose eyes were half popped from his skull, and moved uncannily round and about, like they weren't properly fixed in his head.

“I'm Hubert Fetter,” he said. “Doctor Hubert Fetter.”

“Oh yeah,” said Dietrick. “And what can I do for you?”

“Well, see, here's the thing! I had this collection, see, and it was stolen. And I heard around town that you were the best detective in North Dakota, and I should engage you to search for...what I lost...because you'll find it double quick.”

“Well, I ain't making no guarantees regarding the speed of my investigation, Doctor?”

“I see.”

“But I can tell you his. I never did give up on an investigation. Not once. It took me 13 years one time to track down a woman I'd been paid to find. I never give up.”

“Well, that's good to hear, Dietrick. See my problem is a little out of the ordinary.”

“Oh yeah? What is it you lost?”

“I lost my freaks.”

“Your freaks?”

“Yes, I have a family of freaks and they've been stolen from me. I want them back, Dietrick. They're my pride and joy, those things. I love 'em with all my heart.” He took out an unsavory-looking handkerchief and wiped his face with it. “My life's not worth living without 'em.”

“Well, then, you'd better give me a description of 'em.”

Fetter supplied the details and the detective got to his work. The trail was not completely cold. After four days, Dietrick located a man who sold a car to one of Fetter's freaks.

“Made me sick just to look at the thing!” the man told Dietrick. “It had two heads, this things. And it looked like it would have jumped me and sucked the blood out of me if I'd turned my back on it”

Once he had a description o f the vehicle the freaks were driving, Dietrick simply used his contacts in the police department to have it traced. Two days later, in the early evening, he arrived at a small motel far to the north of the city, where he observed Fetter's freaks coming and going from room 7. Of their abductor there was no sign.

Dietrick didn't make his presence known. He simply called Doctor Fetter who arrived some hours later in a scruffy motor truck. Only then did he show himself.

“Didn't I tell you I'd find 'em for you?” he said, standing at the door of the single room where all the freaks had been living together. It stank of rotted food, of excrement, but most of all of the bodies of the freaks themselves, which seemed to give of a particularly pungent sweat.

“You did indeed,” said Doctor Fetter. Good job! Good job!” He reached into his jacket and took out a strangely decorated wallet.

“You're the one turned us in?” said one of the two heads that sprouted from the neck of the larger of the freaks.

“Why'd you do that?” said the other head.

“I didn't turn you in,” Dietrick said. “I saved you.”

“From what?” said a thing no bigger than a fetus that lay on pillows at the head of the bed. “We ran away from that sonofabitch Fetter!”

“He used us!” said a diminutive woman who stood close to Dietrick. Her tears made her mascara run. “He experiments on us and then when we die, he puts us in jars and exhibits us. Or else skins us!”

“She's crazy!” Fetter protested. “I am a civilized man. I'd never do such a thing -”

The woman suddenly ran toward Fetter and snatched the wallet from his hand opening it up to display its design.

“He skinned my husband when he died after one of his experiments. Look! look! This tattoo was on his chest!”

There on the wallet (which did indeed have the texture of tanned human skin) was a heart tattoo with an arrow passing through it. “Aaron love Tiny Alice” was written on the heart.

“Alice, shut up!” Fetter said and then realizing that in his fury he'd let the truth out, he snatched his wallet off Tiny Alice and pulled a handful of bills from it. “Here, here, take it all!” he said pressing the money on Dietrick. “Just forget what you saw here and go.”

“Don't,” the freak on the pillow begged. “Don't you see how angry he is now? The moment you leave, Fetter will kills us and breed more!”

“Ridiculous,” Fetter said. “They're cretins, Mister Dietrick, that' the tragic truth. Brains the size of peas. But who's to argue with Nature, eh? All I do – out of the kindness of my heart – is give them a place to lay their weary bones.”

Dietrick looked at them one more time – at their loose, drooling mouths, at their monstrously misshapen bodies – and he shook his head.

“Cretins, huh?” he said.

“Human refuse.”

And yet their eyes, Dietrick thought, their eyes. They were filled with feeling, and with a sad but marvelous intelligence.

“You know what?” he said to Fetter. “Maybe I should stick around a while.”

“What for?”

“Just to make sure these folks are getting treated kindly.”

“I don't like your implication, Dietrick. Take your money and get out of here. Go on!”

“No - ” said the two-headed creature who was closest to the door. “ – please stay!”

“Shut up!” Fetter said and delivered the creature a backhanded blow that threw it across the room. Then he glanced back at the detective. “Are you still here?” he said. “I told you: go! This isn't your business.”

“You lied to me,” Dietrick said.

“What if I did?”

“They weren't abducted at all.”

“Don't start getting sentimental, Dietrick. You've got you money - .”

“I'm not interested in your money.” Dietrick pressed passed Fetter and went to where the struck freak now lay, sprawled on the floor. “Here,” he said, offering the creature his hand.

The thing shook its heads. “You'd best go, mister,” one of them said. The other agreed. “Go quick. The Doctor he no play fair.”

“I'm not scared of Fetter,” Dietrick said.

“You should be, mister,” said the first head. “You'll get into trouble if you help us.”

“Go! Please go!”

As it spoke its four eyes slid away from Dietrick's face and focused on something behind him.

Dietrick turned, instinctively raising his hand in front of his face tow off a blow from Fetter. But is was not a blow that was coming his way; it was a hypodermis needle. It plunged into the meat of his hand and his face, Dietrick fell back against the wall. Fetter was on him in an instant, pressing the hypodermic's plunger. Its contests surged into Dietrick's blood stream.

“Oh God...” Dietrick said, “...what have you...?”

He didn't finish the question. The drug Fetter had put into him had already turned his tongue to lead.

“I told you to leave,” Fetter said as the detective slid down the wall. “But no. You had to be the hero, didn't you?” He shook his head. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!”

How many hours went by before the experiment began? Or was it days perhaps? Dietrick no longer knew. He couldn't speak, he couldn't defend himself, he couldn't even piss or shit. The doctor had control of him, utterly, utterly, and everything that passed in front of him did so like a kind of dream. No, not a dream. A nightmare...

Fetter came at him with a hundred hypodermics and filled his flesh with some transforming fluid. Fetter watched him as his drugs took their terrible effect. Dietrick shrank in his skin, decades of decrepitude claiming his flesh, his bone, his marrow.

Only when it was all over and his body had become a contorted broken thing, did Doctor Fetter proffer a mirror, so that Dietrick could see with his one good eye the abomination he had become. He let out a wordless howl that woke others all through the Doctor's Chamber of Transformation: a ragged chorus of melancholia that went on and on and on 'till there was no strength left in their twisted forms.

In the end, mercifully, Fetter lowered his suffering monster into a jar of formaldehyde. It burned as it filled Dietrick's lungs, but through the pain he heard Fetter boasting, of what glories the future held, of how they were all to be part of some Infernal Parade. Fetter's insane boasts meant nothing to Dietrick. The last thought that passed through his head as death overcame him was that there had never been anyone in his life, man or woman, who had cared about him enough to send someone looking for him, the way he had been sent, over the years. Undetected, then, he died.

And in time Doctor Fetter's Family of Freaks, swelled by one, joined the Infernal Parade.