Fairy tale 9 - The Cottage with the Buckets

In a small clearing in the forest there is an old cottage.  It has a low slate roof, white walls and a couple of dilapidated out-buildings.  Over to one side there is an orderly pile of chopped wood.  On the other side is the skeleton of some sort of vehicle.  The bright late morning sunlight dapples through the canopy of ash trees, casting a scene of sunflakes and happy shadow.

Surrounding the cottage are many large white buckets.  Projecting from the top of the cottage is an enormous metal pole.

Inside the cottage are a man and a woman.  They are both mad scientists.  The weather forecast suggests that conditions tonight will be ideal, so they are busy getting ready.  They have deployed the CRISPR equipment, isolated the necessary proteins and prepared the vats of essential fluid.  Now they are running the stimulation wiring from the central conductor to the housing for each of the buckets.

They have done this many times so it does not take them long.  Once the wires are in place they look out of the window, then at each other.  They nod, and retire to their rooms to get changed.

A few moments later they appear from the front door of the cottage wearing clothes of heavy leather and thick textiles and carrying a wide variety of weapons - pistols, knives, a shotgun, a crossbow, a stun gun.  They have nets and a variety of sacks.  They set off into the forest.

Hours later, as dusk is beginning to fall, they return.  Their nets and sacks are full.  The sky is turning an ominous bruised hue.  The storm is approaching.

As humans their natural urge is to hurry; but as scientists they know they must proceed carefully.  Everything must be measured.  All the evidence must be recorded.

Inside the cottage they change quickly out of their hunting gear and into liquid-resistant bodysuits.  They carry the sacks and the large white buckets into the bigger of the two outbuildings and empty the contents of the first sack onto the dissection table.  There are bodies of badgers and foxes, rabbits and voles, muntjacs and weasels.  The scientists work quickly with their scalpels and cleavers.  As soon as one sack is finished, they empty and begin to work on the next sack.

Outside, the wind ahead of the storm has begun to build.  The trees are swaying and complaining.  Beams from the setting sun are bouncing off the underside of the ever-towering clouds, turning the evening scarlet and purple and angry and upsetting.

The scientists put all of the front legs into one bucket, and all of the rear legs into another bucket.  They put all the ears in a bucket, all the paws in a bucket, all the eyes in a bucket.  One bucket is filled with livers. One is filled with brains.  One is filled with intestines.  One bucket – the last bucket – is filled with all the bits that did not belong in any other bucket.

The first flash from the sky that the scientists notice precedes the thunder by almost thirty seconds.  Experience tells the scientists that they are just in time.  Still wearing their blood-stained overalls, they swiftly move all the buckets to their correct locations around the cottage.  They check that the electrical connections are in place before heading inside.  They change into their laboratory coats and take up station in front of the banks of switches, dials and monitors.

A brief glance between them signals a movement from the woman’s hand.  She engages the hydraulics and the metal rod above the cottage extends into the sky, higher and higher until the top is comfortably clear of the tallest nearby tree.  A clap of thunder tells them that the storm is now only three or four kilometres away and will, in all likelihood, pass directly overhead.

Now they must wait.

They wait.  The flashes of lightning are frequent and intense; the thunder seems to be coming from every direction, even from beneath them.

It has happened before, of course, but when the lightning strikes the shock is always overwhelming.  Fifty million volts is never easily contained.  The noise, the smell, the sense of the organic at the mercy of the electrical.  The machinery quivers.  Dials leap into red zones and beyond.  Things frazzle.  Eyelids become ineffective.  Catastrophic amounts of energy are diverted through impossible cables into containers filled with mysterious liquids and hyper-modern genetic material and assorted animal viscera.  Life explodes.

The lightning moves much more slowly than light itself, of course, but it is still much faster than the humans.  It seems to be ages before the scientists react; but they do, emerging from the pulsed shock to check readings and swivel controls.  Three, perhaps four seconds after the lightning strike itself, they raise their attention to the bank of monitors nestled into the eaves of the cottage.  Each image shows a single bucket.

“Limited Initiation Forensic Enquiry version…” the male scientist pauses to check his notes: “version 14.3, activated 22.17.”

On the screens, impossible shapes are unfolding.  Within each bucket, an entity coalesces, shudders and glistens.  Unfathomable motives are unleashed.  The entities slide up, or along, and slither out.  Out of their buckets, their wombs, and into the forest, into the night.

“What are you expecting?” the female scientist asks.  “The same?”

“The same,” the man replies.

Last time, just one of the entities survived.  The time before that, too.

The storm is moving on, and the scientists must once again wait.  This time they must wait until morning. If things are the same as last time, the scientists will wander through the forest and find remnants of the entities.  Some will have come to a halt a few metres from the cottage, their élan vital expended.   Others will have been partially eaten by a carnivore, unable to escape such highly evolved predatory attention.  Most will have travelled a few tens of metres and will in dawn’s light be no more than a glistening puddle of inexplicable viscera.

One – if things are like last time, and the time before – will still be moving.  Its movement will be faltering, unsettling.  Its demeanour will be hesitant yet determined.  It will look like nothing, and everything.  It will – if things are like last time – be the entity that has emerged from the bucket of leftovers.  All the other entities will have expired.  The mongrel entity will persist.

If things are like last time.

“First light,” says the woman scientist.  “Time to go."