I knew a man once by the name of Dr. Ford Ashley. He was a brilliant biochemist and my mentor for the better part of 3 years. When I met Dr. Ashley in June of 2005 he was a character to behold. He stood at 6 feet even but was as thin as a pencil. He had very pale skin and a very slight but consistent cough. He greeted me in his lab with a smile and a weak handshake before coughing into a white handkerchief that seemed to always be in his hand. By this point I had completed most of my schooling and was looking for an expert to help hone the skills and start my own lab someday and do my own research.
Ford as I had come to call him was at first, very introverted. He told me about the things he was getting paid to work on and taught me various techniques to make things faster and easier. It wasn’t until around November of 2005 that I started to learn more about him and his personal goals. Whenever there was free time in the lab he would be searching for cures to various degenerative respiratory diseases. He was a visionary when it came to this, always knowing the outcome before asking the question it seemed.
Around the anniversary of when I started working with Ford I began to learn his true motivation. Up until this point it seemed Ford had spent nearly all of his time at the lab. I would sometimes leave late into the night and return early the next morning only to find Ford toiling away. He never seemed to need sleep either. It was July of 2006 where that slight cough got significantly worse, to the point that it began leaving red and black splotches on that handkerchief. I asked him about it one day and he would only say it was a bad cold or some other common ailment.
I walked into the lab one morning in late July and noticed that Ford wasn’t there. This had never happened before, I’d always either meet him there or more commonly, find him already working. I called his name and no answer came. I didn’t think much of it so I started getting ready for the day, checking the equipment and whatnot when I noticed the door to the office next to the lab was slightly ajar. I went to the door and called out for Ford once more as I opened the door. I saw the crumpled form of Dr. Ashley lay on the floor, blood and black ooze pooling beneath his head.
I rushed to him and propped him up in a chair and thankfully, he awoke. I asked what had happened and he asked for a glass of water. I saw I would get no further with questions at this time so I got him some water and went out to get us breakfast across the street. To my surprise, the day carried on as normal. When we were getting ready to lock up the lab for the night, Ford explained the details of his condition.
Since he was a kid, Ford was near constantly sick. Never anything major, he never went to the doctor. It was always just a slight, dull ill feeling he described it as. The most notable symptom was an ever so slight cough. Near imperceptible if you weren’t looking. Steadily this ailment worsened, not extremely just taking more physical form. When he was about 20 the cough became more prominent and his skin became a sickly pale shade. He said it felt like his bones became frailer as well though he never wanted to test it.
These worsening conditions fueled Ford’s interest in the medical field. He went to school for years studying anything and everything he could. He went to doctors though none of them saw anything specifically wrong with him. Dr. Ashley became cynical to the outside world, starting a life of seclusion and deciding he would be the only one who could save himself. That was, I suppose, until he met me.
After learning this we both took some time off. We came back to the lab in August of 2006 though I suspect Ford had been there long before I came back. Very soon after we got back into the swing of things, Ford clued me in on his plan. What I am about to say sounds like some nonsensical science fiction, but Ford somehow had made a working prototype. His plan was to counteract his body’s weakness, which he found out was more rapid cell decay than normal, by absorbing the essence of other living things.
Ford rolled back his sleeves to show me what he had done. Tubes now ran line veins down his arms. He took off his shirt to reveal that the tubes ran out of his back and they plugged into a sort of grinder like device. This device could be handheld and it had a large enough opening to fit a coconut. At first, Ford would leave it on a desk somewhere and whenever he was feeling particularly ill, he would plug in and feed it a houseplant or two. I was terrified of the machine for some reason. It somehow felt cold and distant not just because it was an inanimate machine, but in a way that only a severely depraved human could be cold and distant.
A bit of time passed on like this and I got used to the machine. It was now April of 2007 and Ford seemed healthier than ever. He got rid of the handkerchief and even started going for walks at the local park whenever he had a chance to get away from the lab. He seemed happy for a change. Then all of a sudden, his condition rapidly started deteriorating. He ended up worse than he started, skin began to dry up in patches and fall off completely, he was coughing near constantly and half of the time blood was coming out. He could barely stand.
Here is where I did the first of a few bad things to come. Ford collapsed once again and his breathing was ragged. I could tell he would die if I didn’t do something soon. I plugged him into the machine and threw some plants into it. It did nothing. My mind raced and all of a sudden, my feet carried me out of the lab and down the hall. There was another lab that tested beauty products in the same building. I went to that lab, grabbed a rat, and came back. I don’t know how I did what I did next so easily but I threw the rat into the jaws of that awful machine.
Ford perked up moments later first thanking me profusely, then consoling me. He said it was a ‘necessary evil’ and at the time, I believed him. We got back to work for a few days when for the first time ever, Dr. Ashley actually wasn’t there. I searched around for him but didn’t see him. Everything was locked up properly and I noticed the machine was gone. Ford did not show up at all that day but I got a decent amount of work done.
The next day Ford apologized for his absence and said there was a family emergency he had to tend to. I didn’t think anything of it. Midway through the day, Ford asked if I wanted to go on a walk in the local park, he said he had found a pretty spot overlooking a large field. I said yes though I said we’d probably be gone the rest of the day as the park is a very large nature preserve. Ford was adamant and said we would take the rest of the day off.
So off we went, into the woods of the park and began to climb up a mountain. I hadn’t had too much time to explore this place as a kid so I was following every twist and turn Ford took to a t. It started to get late when I noticed that Ford wasn’t carrying the machine. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed but I assumed it was at his house or something. Slowly, day became night, just as we got to the mouth of a cave. I was very uneasy at this point but Ford somehow convinced me that we were lost, and should spend the night in the cave.
It was a fairly tight squeeze to get in, the entrance was maybe 3 feet tall and it was decently well hidden behind some hanging moss. I wondered how Ford had been able to spot it. The mouth of the cave looked unstable too, like any sudden force with any sort of weight behind it could collapse the whole thing. My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness and I saw horrors I could not believe. I saw bloodied and torn up bones, hunks of flesh strewn about and blood spatters and hand prints on the walls. I tried to let out a scream but my mouth would not open.
“Why are you so scared?” a crazed voice echoed through the darkness, “Can’t you see this is progress? You helped to make me everything I had ever wanted. This is all because of you!”
I ran for the exit as I heard the saws of the machine hum to life. I looked back to find Ford already upon me. I managed to dodge out of the way enough so that his attack only grazed my leg. It still sawed a chunk clean off. I pushed or punched him, maybe a few times, it’s hard to remember but I managed to make some distance. I sprinted for the cave entrance and jumped out into the cold night air. I slammed on the top of the mouth as I heard the whirring of gears come closer at a rapid pace. Finally, rocks began to fall and sealed off the tunnel with piles and piles of loose earth.
The device Ford had wielded shifted from a brilliant man’s magnum opus, his font of life, to a hungering steel maw, devoid of any emotion or prejudice. I don’t know for sure how many people he had killed. Ford had been overtaken by lunacy. He had become nothing more than an animal whose only goal was survival. I sometimes pity the man to this day, even after all he did, as he did fail in the end. The maw became too hungry, and when I unsealed the cave I had trapped him in days later, the machine had eaten most of his body. It was either wholly gone or shredded beyond recognition. No one knew who Dr. Ashley was or that he had even died, until now I suppose.