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will have great jaws and eat raw flesh by gorging. His strength will be such that he will need neither house nor fire, but will be comfortable in the fields and forests. All the despoiling of the land that man has done will end when the anti-man repopulates the earth with his own issue." Mike stared at the words, dumbfounded. They were talk-ing about nothing less than giving the world to some devil-made species. Insane, insane, insane. Farther along there was a complicated genealogical table, showing how they intended to bring about their anti-human-ity. Generation by generation they were breeding toward the monster. The genealogical table was a chronicle of their progress. It was labeled "The Hidden Kingdom, 1021-1952." It spilled over twenty pages of names and more names, all connected together by lines of relationship. Mike read with increasing foreboding the lists of Tituses, until he quit trying to puzzle the middle centuries together and flipped to the end. Sure enough, there was Martin Titus, wife Mary Derwent Titus, son Jonathan. Mike found a chair. His penlight was beginning to dim but he had to read more and he couldn't risk taking books. All the time he had been right in the middle of the thing. These Tituses weren't just in the cult, they were the cult. And the wonderful kid was heir to the whole damn thing. Biogenetic Atlas: Engineering the Future proved to be a complicated scientific treatise of recent origin. The spine crackled when Mike opened the book. It had been printed in 1981. There were charts and graphs, and detailed diagrams of what seemed to be genetic helixes. The chapter headings were daunting: "Structural Physiology of Titus/Pantera Off-spring." "Biogenetic Reference Tables' to Families 121/166." (Here there were thirty pages of tables of numbers, evi-dently referring to changes in the genetic structure of gener-ation after generation. Every twenty columns or so some-body had made a check mark in red ink beside a major change in the numbers.) Looking at these charts Mike got a sense of the steady progress that had been made by the Night Church, patiently breeding two families together over hundreds and hundreds of generations, breeding them like fruit flies in a laboratory. But the Night Church didn't have laboratory conditions. This had been accomplished across the tumult of his-tory. This section of the book was accompanied by illustrations. The earliest ones were Roman wax paintings, familiar to Mike from an afternoon's wandering Page 113 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html through the Metropoli-tan Museum with Mary. He had assumed them to be satyrs or something. Not until now had he ever dreamed that those old Roman monsters were real, living creatures. According to the text, carefully bred people with the proper genetic structure could briefly become such monsters in a ceremony called the Rituale Pudibunda Coitus. Thus transformed, they were called monstrum. If a man in the monstrum state inseminated a correctly bred woman, the resulting anti-human would be male. If the woman was the monstrum, the child would be female. Generation after generation they had tried to give birth to a living anti-man. All they needed was a male: he would be able to mate with normal humans and produce monstrous offspring. But they hadn't succeeded. One would be born with a defective heart, another with an unformed brain, a third with some mysterious genetic disease. It was as. if nature rebelled against the travesty. Astonishingly their failures were chronicled publicly, there for all to see just like the old Roman paintings. As time went on the creatures had become more and more terrible. Anybody could study them even now: their portraits were on all the Gothic cathedrals in the world. They were the gargoyles. Generations of failure had only spurred the Night Church to greater efforts of breeding. Mike reflected as he read that here was a group of people in love with death. Their books were decorated by images of Thoth, the all-seeing Egyptian god of the underworld. Thoth and the arms of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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