Arcadia Burns

THE TRANSFORMATION


ROSA WAS PERFECTLY CALM. Exhaustion that had nothing to do with her run came over her. Like the feeling when hysteria changes to dull indifference. She had passed the point of screaming and raging, and had reached a state when she felt nothing anymore.

“Who else?”

Mattia sighed. “The building where the party was held, Eighty-Five Charles Street…it’s in the West Village. Does that address mean anything to you?”

Her fists were clenched so hard that her fingernails dug deep into the palms of her hands. “Tell me names. One or two of them, any names you know.”

Something was happening outside. Mattia’s glance moved nervously from Rosa to the terrace. He cursed under his breath. “There’s a car coming, on the other side of the pond. Those are Michele’s men.”

“Mattia, damn it!” she shouted at him. Now, at last, she felt something again, and she welcomed that familiar but still strange sensation like a friend.

“One of the apartments in that building…it belonged to Gaettano. That’s—”

“Tano?” She stumbled back and knocked into one of the tables covered with model boats. “That Tano?”

“He was here a lot. He and Michele were good friends. Michele’s younger brother was shot a few days ago, but that didn’t hit him half as hard as Tano’s death a couple of months back. His brother Carmine was a bastard, even Michele could see that, and a coked-up walking corpse, too. More people mourned him in Colombia than here in New York. But to Michele, when Tano died it was—”

“I was there.”

He nodded. “Michele says you’re responsible for his death.”

“I wish I were.” She ran her hands over her face. After so long, she suddenly felt dirty and humiliated again, as if the rape had been only yesterday.

Tano. And Michele.

Once again she had to lean against the wall for support. “Anyone else?”

“Those two are the only ones I know about.” He was obviously uneasy, and not just because of the headlights approaching along the perimeter of the pond. “But there must have been others involved, probably two of three of the men waiting outside for us now.”

She closed her eyes, felt her breath streaming into her lungs and out again. And every time she let air out, something else rose with it, slowly, as if it first had to dig its way out from deep within her up to the surface. A chill that had nothing to do with winter was spreading through her rib cage, rolling over the remains of the serum in her bloodstream like a wave of quicksilver.

“What do you want from me?” she asked Mattia.

“If Valerie really is in Europe, then she’ll turn up at your place there sooner or later.”

“She dragged me along to that party with her, Mattia. If she knows what happened there, and that Michele was involved—”

“She was the one who told me about it, the very next day. That was the last time I saw her.”

Scales were forming on the backs of her hands. They felt like tiny hairs standing erect in an icy draft of air. “If I see her, I’ll kill her.”

“But she couldn’t help it! She swore that to me. She didn’t find out until later that night, when Michele told her. Michele was doped up to the eyeballs at the time. It knocked her sideways, and she came to me to—”

“Oh, sure,” she interrupted icily. “I bet she felt truly terrible. Because I had been raped. By her boyfriend.”

The sound of the car engine laboring as it made its way through the snow was getting louder. But Mattia was so desperately trying to justify Valerie that he took no notice of it.

“It wasn’t her fault,” he said. “She said she wanted to talk to you. She was going to ask you to forgive her.”

Forgive her. Rosa felt like laughing at him for his stupid, blind love for a girl like that, but then she remembered how she herself had fallen under her spell. Valerie had charisma that made it easy for her to bewitch other people.

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “Act as if nothing happened?”

“When you see her, tell her I’m waiting for her,” he said. “Tell her she can always come back to me, never mind what she’s done. You’re the only hope I have left. If Valerie’s alive, she’ll go to you to ask your forgiveness. That’s what she said then.”

Rosa thought of the video, and she wondered whether Valerie hadn’t, in fact, tried to get in touch with her long before this. She just didn’t understand how Trevini had come to be involved.

The car stopped by the terrace. Its headlights shone through the window, casting the shadows of the sailboats on the back wall of the room. They looked like rows of black teeth.

Rosa’s skin was moving beneath her clothes. Scales caught on fibers of fabric, rubbing against each other like the surfaces of Velcro fasteners. Her tongue split into two in her mouth, but it happened so naturally that she noticed only when she tried to speak.

For a second she wondered whether he had told her all this intentionally, to set off exactly this reaction—the one moment when she lost all control over her body.

Metal clinked as tools were unloaded from the car. Footsteps stamped through the snow, and then she heard voices outside the door.

Rosa realized that she wasn’t in human form anymore only when she sank to the floor in the middle of her clothing. It didn’t hurt; it never did. It was almost pleasant, as if in leaving her human body she also left behind some of her fears. She perceived everything now with a cold, precise, reptilian mind.

Outside, orders were given, and then there was a long-drawn-out mechanical hissing sound. Mattia swore. “They’ve brought an oxy-acetylene cutter with them. They’ll be through the door in a couple of minutes with that.”

Rosa looked up at him from the floor, trying to get her bearings in her new shape. She wanted to say something to him, but found that only a hiss would come from her throat. Anger took possession of her, and she couldn’t direct her feelings in any particular way or against any individual. Valerie, Michele, even the dead Tano—they had all merged into a faceless phantom that aroused nothing but rage in her. Rage that banished her human thinking and dominated the mind of the snake.

An acrid smell wafted under the door. She felt vibrations that she couldn’t have perceived in human form. But the noise was suddenly more diffuse. She knew that she had to rely more on her sense of smell than on her hearing. Her field of vision was more restricted, too, and she didn’t see as clearly, although she saw differences of temperature optically, almost as an infrared camera would show them. That may have been why she saw the glowing patches on the door way before Mattia. The men were moving the oxy-acetylene cutter in a semicircle around the handle and lock. If the door had nothing else securing it at the top and the bottom, it would swing open as soon as the locking mechanism was cut away.

Mattia called to her to get to the back of the room and escape through one of the windows while he distracted the Panthera. She heard him, but it was a moment before she could connect the sound of his words with their meaning. Then she slid nimbly under the tables of model boats and deeper into the shadows.

Mattia was still in human form when he ran over to the workbench and pulled a plastic canister out from among the cans of paint and varnish. Rosa waited a moment to see what he was doing. With frantic movements, he opened it and held it upside down over a plastic bucket. The caustic smell immediately threatened to cloud her heightened senses; as a snake, she felt as if someone were dripping acid into her nose. Rosa hurried away, but the odor of the solvent followed her through the boathouse.

The gurgling as the canister was emptied into the bucket was dull to her snake’s ears. The hissing of the oxy-acetylene cutter was more aggressive. When she looked back, the tops of the tables got in the way of her view of the door. Between two of the tables, she raised the front half of her serpentine body almost five feet up in the air, saw a window in front of her, and glanced back once more.

Mattia threw the empty canister aside, picked up the bucket, and ran to the door. He took up a position two steps away from it. The cutter had left a glowing track in the iron, a white half-moon shape around the lock. Sparks were flying into the room. Outside, two men called something to each other, but to Rosa it only sounded muffled, strange, incomprehensible.

But she felt new vibrations, much stronger now, as someone kicked the door from the outside. She knew from experience that her hypersensitivity would wear off soon, as soon as her mind was used to the new body. At this point, however, it was still almost unbearable. The air itself seemed to throb with every blow to the door.

She went down between the tables again, heading for the window in the back. Only when she had reached the wall did she raise her snake’s head again and look out through the glass. Leafless bushes stood outside the window; she could see the lights of Fifth Avenue through their branches. It wasn’t far, but at this moment the street might as well have been on the moon.

The damn mesh over the glass was too narrow.

Her amber-colored snake’s body was the size of a human thigh at its widest point. She would never be able to force it through the fine steel screen, even if she succeeded in pushing out the glass without beheading herself.

Her head swung around when there was a metallic grinding sound from the entrance. The point of light showing the cutter’s path blazed with painful intensity while it moved once more along the glowing track. Mattia stood motionless in the dim light, holding the bucket of acrid solvent in his hand.

He glanced at her. “The other window! Quick!”

While the bright tip of the cutter in the iron traveled the last half inch, Rosa slid over to the next window. The pane stood ajar; she could easily open it with her head. It swung open without a sound, and cold night air immediately blew in. Mattia had planned ahead here, too. The steel mesh itself was as narrow as in the other pane, but now she saw that the long screws holding it in place had been removed. It was loose in the frame, and a firm push from inside would be enough to—

Something was making its way through the bushes. Twigs cracked under mighty paws. A muscular body with tiger stripes.

The big cat was patrolling the back of the boathouse. Even as Rosa stared, the tiger raised his head and looked straight at her. Their eyes met. He opened his mouth and let out a savage roar.

Rosa heard the sound of feet kicking the iron door behind her again. This time, the glowing edge of the hole traced by the cutter gave way. As she swiveled around, Rosa saw the door swing in and the shapes of two men appear. One with the oxy-acetylene cutter, its blade of flame blazing in the darkness as if through a half-closed eye, the other with a shotgun raised.

Mattia flung the contents of the bucket at them. As it flew through the air, the flame set the solvent on fire. The explosion enveloped the men, turning them into living torches. Screaming, they stumbled apart. The gun fell to the floor; the flame of the cutter went out. The burning fluid was blazing in the doorway and in front of the entrance.

Rosa was briefly dazzled. For a few seconds all she saw was brightness. She was almost stunned by the stench of the chemicals and could hear hardly anything except the men’s screams. Within a moment Mattia took on his panther shape and, with one great leap, sprang through the flames. Here and there sparks caught on his fur, leaving little tracks of light.

Now Rosa was alone in the boathouse. She turned to the window again, hoping that the tiger had been driven away by the noise and heat, but instead he had come closer and was looking straight in at her. He stood up on his hind legs, propping his forepaws on the windowsill. The light of the fire danced in his eyes; glittering saliva dripped from his fangs. Rosa ought to have known better than to count on his mind being a tiger’s; this was a man in the shape of a big cat, and he had worked out long ago what she planned to do. Soon he would notice that the mesh was loose in the window frame, he would pull at it from outside, and with one leap he would be in the room with her.

She abruptly dropped to the floor and slid under the tables in the direction of the door. The heat was fiercer here. The glow and the wavering heat haze blurred Rosa’s vision more and more. The noise could no longer be unraveled into voices: It was a chaotic mixture of human screams, the sound of the flames, and the roaring of the Panthera. Had they caught Mattia? Were they waiting for Rosa to find a way out into the open air? Or had they started to retreat, well aware that no bribe, however large, could keep the firefighters away from this?

Rosa realized that the place was also burning overhead when scraps of sailcloth sank to the floor around her in flames. Splashes of solvent must have carried the fire to the front tables. Several model boats had caught at the same time, and now the flames were leaping from table to table, fanned by the draft between the entrance and the open window.

The only way out was through the door. Large areas of the floor were burning on both sides of it. One of the men lay twitching in the middle of the puddle of bubbling solvent; the other was nowhere to be seen.

The tiger roared at the window behind Rosa. With a furious blow of his paw, he tore the mesh out of the frame. It fell with a clatter.

Her chances of getting out of here alive were shrinking with every second that passed. In human form, she could have tried leaping across the sea of flames. As a snake, however, she could move only over the floor, through the middle of it.

She couldn’t close her eyes because they had no lids. She could hardly breathe for the stench, and the heat was nearly intolerable. Even the concrete seemed to be burning where the solvent had seeped into its hairline cracks. The steel threshold of the doorway glowed like a red neon sign.

The glass of the window broke behind Rosa as the tiger leaped into the room, and the frame crashed against the wall. He raced toward Rosa under the tables where the burning boats stood. His jaws snapped shut just where one of her coils had been lying. His fangs scored furrows in her scaly skin, but missed her backbone. Fire rained down on the tiger’s fur and made him shrink back, but not for long. The stench of burnt hair mingled with all the other fumes, choking her.

Rosa hissed. Quick as lightning, she drew up the back part of her body, giving herself enough of a forward thrust to shoot through the flames as fast as an arrow, straight into the boiling chemicals.

Blazing brightly, her scales scraped over the glowing floor. Fluid that didn’t extinguish anything but was several hundred degrees drenched her skin. Her flesh hissed and bubbled; the tips of her split tongue drew far back into her jaws, like sizzling plastic.

Her snake body was almost nine feet long, but she managed to catapult it forward with a single thrust of her muscles. The way out of the flames seemed endless, although it lasted only seconds. She passed swiftly under something, and realized only later that it had been the drawn-up legs of the burning corpse. She could hardly see anything, and her other senses were also failing her. It didn’t seem to matter anymore that the Panthera were waiting.

Wrapped in flame, she shot out of the oily, seething puddle and onto the terrace. The ice had melted around the fire, but Rosa was in the snow again. She hardly felt the cold. Her pain was all around her. Her mind had withdrawn; all that was left were the motor functions of her reptilian body.

But then she did hear something: the howling and roaring of the Panthera everywhere around her. She barreled through them, enveloped in water vapor and the smoke that rose from her roasting, scaly skin. By the time the first Panthera had overcome his fear of the flames and taken up pursuit, she was already slithering over the side of the terrace and down to the frozen pond.

The layer of ice was no thicker than a finger’s width. It couldn’t support the heat and weight of a gigantic snake on fire.

Frigid water swallowed Rosa up immediately after she hit the ice. She vaguely heard some of the Panthera jump in after her, and then sink with roars of panic.

But she swam forward, on and out into the freezing, healing, trance-like darkness.