“Let’s go to the party,” Lucy said.
“No, I don’t think I should,” Tom said. “I need to study. I almost flunked the last test.”
“Oh, come on. The next exam is still another month away.”
Tom resolutely shook his head. Lucy shrugged and said, “Oh well, your loss.” Then she stood up and walked down the remaining steps of the library’s front staircase.
A green car filled with three other students slowed to a stop in front of her and Jeffrey, who was sitting in the back seat, poked his head out the window and asked, “Isn’t Tom coming?”
“No, he said he needs to study.”
Jeffrey opened the door from inside and slid farther in to make room for Lucy. Before she slammed the door shut, he said, “He is being a little anti-social lately, don’t you think?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess his test result must have been really bad.”
“No, it wasn’t,” their designated driver Jenna said. “He scored a B+ on Statistics and an A- on Economics. If he can get that kind of score for those two papers, then the other stuff must have been A’s.”
“Wow,” Jeffrey said, “I would love to know what he is taking. The best score I got was a B, and the rest were C’s.”
“I know what you mean,” George piped from the front passenger seat. “Kinda weird though, because Tom never really was a high achiever. I mean he does okay, but a string of A’s is just not him.”
Lucy said, “Maybe his dad gave him an ultimatum. I mean he used to complain that his old man was always on his back.”
Jenna honked. A young woman waved and dashed across the narrow street then slid into the seat next to Jeffrey. “I hope you didn’t wait too long. Good grief, I thought I would never get out of the office.”
“Let’s go,” George said. “There will barely be any beer left once we get there.” With a honk and waves they drove off.
Tom returned his friends' cheery adieus with a stiff smile and nod. The moment they drove round a corner and went out of sight, he stood up and trotted down the steps. After a brisk walk down the pedestrian path lining the street, he jogged through a small botanical garden and into a 3-storey building just across from it.
No one was about. He climbed the stairs to the second floor and opened a door marked ‘Dermatological Research’. Only a dim light lit the lab-like room which had an autopsy table in the middle of it. Tom stripped out of his clothes, folded them and placed them in a drawer. Then he tore open a strip of skin down his front which stretched from the middle of his chest down to his loins, and pulled down the zipper behind it. A formless, almost jelly-like, pale person emerged. It hung Tom’s skin onto a hanger, and placed it inside a large freezer which was already half-filled with other skins.
It then selected a woman’s skin, and slipped it on. As it walked to a mirror, the loose skin flapped about it like a balloon partially filled with water. It grasped a hose, stuffed it into its mouth and began to drink down the salt water pumped into it in gulps. The skin stretched and soon a curvaceous woman in her late twenties began to take form. She had curly short brown hair and down one side of her back was the tattoo of a pin-up girl in a seductive pose.
“Hello, my name is Katie,” she said in a hoarse man’s voice, as she arranged her chin, cheeks and lips into their proper positions. “Would you like to have a little fun?” She said, and repeated the same words to herself over and over again until she managed to get a sexy female tone. Then she put on her makeup and a dress that bared her back and clung to her curves. She walked out of the room and into the shadows of the botanical garden.
“Who are you?” an angry man’s voice said.
She turned and saw that it was Tom’s Philosophy lecturer, Professor Stonewell. “I am waiting for someone.”
“I know what you are,” he said. “I would like you to leave right now before I call security.”
“But I really have an appointment to meet with Dr. Amberly of the Dermatological Department. I am half an hour early, so I thought of enjoying the garden for a little bit.” She turned her back to him then twisted her head to look into his eyes and touched her tattoo. “She told me she could remove this without scarring me.”
Stonewell cleared his throat. “I think it would be best if you wait for Dr. Amberly in her office.”
She moved closer, so closed that her toes almost touched his. “My name is Katie. Would you like to have some fun?”
“I am calling security,” he said but just before he could turn away from her, he felt a sharp sting, like an electric jolt, at the back of his hand. He looked down, and right before his eyes, his flesh began to swell. He started to feel dizzy, and his heartbeat grew louder and louder until it was all that he could hear.
Katie leaned his body onto hers and dragged him back into the building. Once they were in the lab, she took off his clothes and laid him on the autopsy table. Then it slipped out of Katie’s skin and hung it next to Amberly’s.
It turned back to Stonewell, picked up a scalpel by the side and traced a straight line down his front. Once the skin was opened, it lay atop him and began to force itself inside. As it did so, blood and seawater gushed out onto the table, and down the drainpipe.
Stonewell stared at the giant box jellyfish in the aquarium. Inside its bulbous transparent parachute-like head were a few small semi-digested fish. Dr. Benson, a bearded stout man, came to stand by his side and said, “Beautiful isn’t it?”
“Absolutely. You’ve just fed it?”
“Yeh, two days ago I think. A pity we lost the first one.”
“Still couldn’t figure out how it happened?”
“We didn’t at first. But then two weeks later one of the security guards stopped coming to work. We’ve told the police about it, but they couldn’t find him either.” A heavy sigh. “These things are so hard to get and so expensive to transport over. In fact, I’m surprise it didn’t kill him instantly.”
Stonewell tapped lightly on the glass. The jellyfish became still. He tapped some more and the jellyfish began flashing pink and purple. Benson leaned his face forward and squinted. “I’ve never seen it do that before.”
“There is always a first time for everything,” Stonewell said and walked away.
Benson remained where he was, staring at the jellyfish until it began to move about again. He tapped on the glass the way he saw Stonewell did, but the creature did not respond. He decided to come back again that night, so he could study its responses without the distraction of students and other faculty related duties.
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