Marie Curie is arguably the most famous female scientist in history: a double Nobel Prize winner whose discoveries changed our understanding of the universe. But her childhood was anything but idyllic. When Marie was eight, her sister died of typhus. A year later, Marie’s mother succumbed to tuberculosis. These profound losses threw her into deep depression. She abandoned both her musical studies and her religion. Making matters worse, the Russian-controlled school she attended was an oppressive environment.
Luckily for humanity, Marie applied her brilliant mind and indomitable spirit to expanding the frontiers of science, doubly difficult for a woman of that time period. But what if Marie had instead drifted toward the darkness? What if she had used her talents for diabolical purposes? The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie imagines that, with 16 original horror and dark fantasy/science fiction stories from a murderer’s row of talented authors.
Contributing Authors: Christine Taylor Butler, Mylo Carbia, G.P. Charles, Stacia Deutsch, Sarah Beth Durst, Henry Herz, Alethea Kontis, Susanne Lambdin, Dee Leone, Jonathan Maberry, Emily McCosh, Seanan McGuire, Steve Pantazis, Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Scott Sigler, Jo Whittemore, and Jane Yolen (poems)
THE BEAST
By Stacia Deutsch
Fifteen Minutes – Marie – Paris – 1934
In fifteen minutes, I will make a tragic, irreversible mistake that will terrorize not only the small town of my youth but also send the entire nation into a panic. To die or not to die, it’s a simple binary choice. There are only two alternatives, and being solely of one body and one mind, I must decide.
It comes to this: I can time travel to the past in an attempt to save the planet from endless torment from a monster of my own creation and, thus doing so, seal my own demise. Or I stay here in the city with the knowledge that I unleashed a tormentor who will, in due course, destroy us all. By “destroy,” I do not mean death, as the creature does not need to feed very often. Rather, the destruction would be an unrelenting psychological trauma—the uncertainty of something dangerous always lurking in the shadows—unpredictable and unstoppable.
In the solitary quiet of my Parisian laboratory, I sit at my custom-made desk, perched on the edge of my fine chair, gently caressing a narrow test tube in my palm. The cool glass restrains the incredible power of the substance within. The isotopes call to me in ways few can understand, for I discovered them, and they course through me, literally in my blood.
I raise the vial and run a finger around the stopper. It glows with a blue-green soluble luminescence. This lovely faint glow is one of my greatest joys. All of the awards, the accolades knowing that I, as a Polish woman, have earned for achieving the unimaginable, recede from memory as I stare at the vial. At night, like now, it’s as if fairies have invaded my workspace. They call to me from inside the glass. Like Alice of the fictional world, I hear “Drink me,” a siren’s song dancing in my head. I try to shut it down. I cannot.
The white walls in my beautiful, state-of-the-art workspace feel expansive as I remove the cap and swallow the precise dosage. With my eyes closed, I can feel the radioactivity my husband, Pierre, and I discovered, course through me. I wonder, if he were still alive, would he be horrified to know what I did when I was a young woman, long before we even met? Would he support me now? Would his opinion matter?
I retrieve a second bottle, identical to the first in every way, from my desk drawer. Knowing this small glass tube is my ticket back to the here and now, I clutch it protectively in my fist and finally relax back into my chair. The wind billows the curtains around an open window as my journey begins.
I am Marie Curie, and this is my cross.
Two Months, Five Days – Marya – Poland – 1883
“How are you feeling today?” my father asked, pulling back the curtains of my darkened room.
“The light!” I gasped at the sudden brightness. Shutting my eyes tightly, I allowed my brain to first feel the sun’s warmth, then slowly blinked, gradually adjusting to the afternoon light. My head pounded, and my body felt like rubber. “Come back in an hour,” I begged my father.
“It’s time for me to leave the country and return to Warsaw,” my father told me, as if we’d had a conversation about travel.
My head felt thick, and my tongue thicker. I took a sip of water along with two pain pills from the bedside table then forced myself upright. “Leaving? When are we leaving?”
He sighed in the way my father did ever since Mother had passed years earlier. “You will stay here,” he said in a scolding tone. “I go alone.”
I struggled to catch up, feeling that I had plinked down in the middle of a conversation. “Papa?” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and willed the pills to take effect. “I don’t understand.”
“For a gold medal student,” he said, “one would imagine you’d be the one explaining the ways of the world to me, not the other way around.”
I licked my parched lips as fleeting memories floated to consciousness. Gold medal. Yes. I’d graduated the gymnasium with highest honors and accolades for being so young. After that, things were less clear. I’d retreated to my room. Not this room, but rather the cramped, small, cluttered room I shared with my sister at our home in Warsaw. It was suffocating. Even the open window didn’t provide enough air. I couldn’t think, or perhaps I didn’t want to think. I remember my sister shouting that I’d collapsed, but my head was so clouded I couldn’t assure her I wasn’t dead. Perhaps I was.
***
Henry Herz has written for Daily Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Pseudopod, Metastellar, Titan Books, Highlights for Children, Ladybug Magazine, and anthologies from Penguin-Random House, Albert Whitman, Blackstone Publishing, Third Flatiron, Brigids Gate Press, Air and Nothingness Press, Baen Books, and elsewhere. He’s edited nine anthologies and written fourteen picture books. www.henryherz.com
