The paleontologist had prepared a Lean Cuisine for himself. Apparently Charlotte didn't eat any more, so instead he had placed a vase full of cut flowers where her plate should go. As Nilla tried not to watch Charlotte slowly and methodically tore the petals off the flowers and crumpled them between her fingers.
Charlotte was still alive. Vronski had assured Nilla of that fact at least three times. It was hard to believe him. Boils and eruptions covered the skin of her one remaining arm, which emerged from under a pendulous roll of ill-defined flesh. When she moved Nilla could almost make out the shape of a human being in the mass.
The paleontologist's wife had been a lawyer, once, he had told her. Now she was an abomination. Pancreatic cancer had blossomed inside of her, spreading to every part of her body. It should have killed her. Vronski had kept her alive at the cost of apocalypse, but in the process he had kept the cancer alive as well. Apparently there had been no choice.
The cancer outweighed what was left of Charlotte, probably by a factor of three to one. Its abstract tissue draped over her back and down her sides. It dragged on the floor behind her. It obscured her breasts and hips and it completely hid her face. It mostly looked like fat tissue covered in thin, translucent skin, but in places it had tried to form itself into pieces of a human being. A row of perfectly-formed teeth emerged from the smooth expanse where Charlotte's shoulder must be. Patches of hair had broken out here and there on her back and there were fingernails growing in places that weren't fingers. A single closed eyelid could be seen on her stomach.
A thick bundle of black cables drooped from under the roll of flesh and snaked its way out of the room. It connected Charlotte's nervous system directly to the Source. Without those cables, Vronski explained, she would die instantly. The human parts of her were incapable of supporting the cancerous parts without direct stimulation.
'I kept her alive,' he said, over and over. The culmination of his life's work.
He had tried his best to give her back a face. To this end he had bought a porcelain domino mask'the kind found in little girl's bedrooms around the country'and tied it around where her head should be with a length of pink ribbon. From time to time it would begin to slip down and Vronski would patiently get up and readjust it.
He had not bothered to put any clothes on her, though Nilla imagined it would take a tent's worth of cloth to cover her swollen bulk.
'Is she' is she even aware of us?' Nilla asked, dragging her gaze away from Charlotte to look at the thing's husband. 'Can she smell us or something?'
'Please don't,' he hissed.
After dinner he agreed to take Nilla down to look at the Source. On the way she passed quite close by Charlotte. She noticed the mask had been broken at some point and very carefully glued back together.
“There have been some psychological adjustments we had to make,” he whispered, but said no more.
Vronski lead her down two flights of stairs into a room at the very bottom of the museum. It had been used once as a workshop and laboratory and it was still full of crates full of carefully-packed fossils. Vronski offered to show her his best specimens'he claimed to have a nearly intact archaeopteryx'but Nilla was far more interested in the room's other contents. Namely, the Source.