Shadowfires

function.
    “No,” he said softly, “no,” trying to deny what he saw before him.
But it was true, and he felt its truth under his fingertips as he
explored farther along the top of his head. The strange bony ridge
was most prominent on his forehead, but it was on top of his head, as
well, beneath his hair, and he even thought he could feel it growing
as he traced its course toward the back of his skull.
    His body was transforming itself either at random or to some
purpose that he could not grasp, and there was no way of knowing when
it would finally stop. It might never stop. He might go on growing,
changing, reconstituting himself in myriad new images, endlessly. He
was metamorphosing into a freak… or just possibly, ultimately, into
something so utterly alien that it could no longer be called
human.
    The bony ridge tapered away at the back of his skull. He moved his
hand forward again to the thickened shelf of bone above his eyes. It
made him look vaguely like a Neanderthal, though Neanderthal man had
not had a bony crest up the center of his head. Or a knob of bone at
one temple. Nor had Neanderthals-or any other ancestors of humanity-
ever featured the huge, swollen blood vessels where they shone darkly
and pulsed disgustingly in his brow.
    Even in his current degenerative mental condition, with every
thought fuzzy at the edges and with his memory clouded, Eric grasped
the full and horrible meaning of this development. He would never be
able to reenter society in any acceptable capacity. Beyond a doubt,
he was his own Frankenstein monster, and he had made-was continuously
making-a hopeless and eternal outcast of himself.
    His future was so bleak as to give new meaning to the word. He
might be captured and survive in a laboratory somewhere, subjected to
the stares and probes of countless fascinated scientists, who would
surely devise endless tests that would seem like valid and
justifiable experiments to them but would be pure and simple torture
to him. Or he might flee into the wilderness and somehow make a
pathetic life there, giving birth to legends of a new monster, until
someday a hunter stumbled across him by accident and brought him
down. But no matter which of many terrible fates awaited him, there
would be two grim constants: unrelenting fear, not so much fear of
what others would do to him, but fear of what his own body was doing
to him; and loneliness, a profound and singular loneliness that no
other man had ever known or ever would know, for he would be the only
one of his kind on the face of the earth.
    Yet his despair and terror were at least slightly ameliorated by
curiosity, the same powerful curiosity that had made him a great
scientist. Studying his hideous reflection, staring at this genetic
catastrophe in the making, he was riveted, aware that he was seeing
things no man had ever seen. Better yet: things that man had not been meant to see. That was an exhilarating feeling. It was what a
man like him lived for. Every scientist, to some degree, seeks a
glimpse of the great dark mysteries underlying life and hopes to
understand what he sees if he is ever given that glimpse. This was
more than a glimpse. This was a long, slow look into the enigma of
human growth and development, as long a look as he cared to make it,
its duration determined only by the extent of his courage.
    The thought of suicide flickered only briefly through his mind and
then was gone, for the opportunity presented to him was even more
important than the certain physical, mental, and emotional anguish
that he would endure henceforth. His future would be a strange
landscape, shadowed by fear, lit by the lightning of pain, yet he was
compelled to journey through it toward an unseen horizon. He had
to find out what he would become.
    Besides, his fear of death had by no means diminished due to these
incredible developments. If anything, because he now seemed nearer
the grave than at any time in his life, his necrophobia had an even
tighter grip on him. No matter what form and quality of life lay
ahead of him, he must go on; though his metamorphosis was deeply
depressing and bloodcurdling, the alternative to life held even
greater terror for him.
    As he stared into the mirror, his headache returned.
    He thought he saw something new in his eyes.
    He leaned closer to the mirror.
    Something about his eyes was definitely odd, different, but he
could not quite identify the