The Legend of Poor John Terrace

ohn Terrace was maybe twenty years old, almost unnaturally serious, the son of a family of wealthy investors who entrusted their money to a company of undeniably brilliant scientists who had dreams, and even a bit of physical progress, in the area of great giant machines designed to be operated by the human mind. He was strong, solid, and famously taciturn, with the kind of smooth-edged face that made him look younger and maybe stupider than he was. He was soft-spoken and soft-handed, and this is how the legend starts, no matter who happens to be telling it.

The legend is vague, of course, as every good legend should be, and though the story is more specific than the legend, both come to the same point through the kind of accident horrific enough to be censored by the passage of time, the kind that can tear the arms and legs off someone as strong and solid as poor John Terrace. And this, of course, is what happened to poor John Terrace, his shoulders turned to gaping, red sockets and the near-indestructible bones in his thighs snapped like sugar glass, leaving him unable to do anything but stare at the rafters above the concrete floor where he lay, the shouts of the people panicking around him growing fainter and the lights dimmer with every spinning, passing second.

"Jesus Christ!" shouted John Terrace's incredibly wealthy parents to the team of overworked scientists who stood about in their white lab coats. "Do something!"

"What do you mean?" said the scientists, who honestly didn't know.

"Our son's been ripped apart!" cried the Terraces, understandably hysterical. "You've got to do something!"

(“Oh God," said John, quietly, from across the room where he lay on a table, a hastily rigged machine pouring his blood back into his body. No one heard him.)

The scientists looked uncomfortable. "Well," they said, shifting nervously and looking at each other, giving each other the kind of looks that make it clear that There Are No Guarantees. "We can try."

And when John woke up he had new arms and legs, ones that were five times stronger than his old ones, and sized in proportion to their strength but not to his bruised, mended little body, having been taken from a machine that was made to do all the things people are too small to do. And they were wired into the torn ends of the nerves of his shoulders and hips so that he could move them with the remainders of his battered musculature, and so that every single time he did he would get blinding, searing, excruciating pains that went all the way up his spine.

"Oh God," he said again, and like the last time his parents didn't really hear--this was the first time he had been awake in two days, of course, and all they heard was the sound of him being alive, and instead of particularly listening they cried and hugged the little bit of him that wasn't made of chrome tubing and thanked God for not taking him from them.

If you have heard the legend of John Terrace, you will know already that he had a girlfriend. In the legend she is never given a name, being at most a sympathetic minor character. In the real story her name was Poloma. Her parents, as one would expect, called her Polly, but John had always called her by her full name, making him sound oddly serious in a way that sometimes made her laugh. And in both stories, after two days of tearful waiting, she was brought into a weirdly sterile room, and after a moment the door opened and John's father led him in by the hand, and she took one look at him and screamed.

And when he stepped toward her she screamed again, even though she didn't want to, and backed up until her back was against the wall and she had to lean her head back as far as it could go just to look him in the eye.

"Poloma," said John, very seriously, and very, very quietly. "It hurts."

"Get away from me, John," she said. She said it calmly, but the truth was that there wasn't much of John left between all those wires and pistons, and what was even more horrifying was that he was crying, plainly and openly as if he wasn't even aware of it, the tears just streaming down his face even though it was as blank as ever.

"Poloma," he said again. "It's hurting me. It hurts so bad."

"Stop saying my name!" she said, and she covered her face and sobbed.

John watched her for a few seconds. "Poloma," he said finally, "I want you to kill me."

And she screamed again.

"Kill me," said John Terrace.

"No," said Poloma. "Don't you dare tell me that. I won't."

"Kill me," said John.

"No!" Poloma screamed.

And then something sudden happened, like something that had been stretched too tight had suddenly reached its breaking point, and by the time the police got there there was nothing left but broken beams and broken bones and a lingering haze of pulverized concrete, fragments of glass tubing that crunched underfoot and dark smears on what was left of the walls. They didn’t even find poor John Terrace.

It was cleaned up well, of course, not least for the benefit of the poor scientists and their unfinished machine that had made its unknowing and unfortunate sacrifice, because despite what some may say there is nothing quite so devastating to a business than having its name connected to a vague and mindless rampage. And that was how he became a legend—not even a proper legend, but the sort that parents use to idly threaten disobedient children. “You close that window, or John Terrace’s going to come in in the middle of the night and get you!”

He never did, obviously. By the time most children were old enough to have heard the legend they knew that John Terrace had never existed anyway. But there were always a few odd characters who claimed otherwise; who maintained that they had seen him in the ruins of the old mansion that everyone called the Terrace estate, despite their knowing that there had almost certainly never been any such family. They went out there on dares and with young delusions of adventure and came back slightly quieter, scraped up and covered in dust and rambling about that monster John Terrace. They said he was nearly twice the height of the average man, with legs like stone columns and arms like tarnished silver tree trunks stitched into shoulders far too small. They said he never spoke, but there were tracks down the cheeks of his empty face from crying and he could deal out destruction to brick walls and windows and the brittle inner framework of the fearful and fragile human body without blinking, without hesitation, without change of expression or bringing one awful hand up to wipe the thin skin under his eyes.

No one ever tried to kill John Terrace. One can only make so many sacrifices, I suppose.

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A rather old one. Thinking about legends, the kind of things where the story finishes and you just sort of stare and go, "Was that supposed to teach me something?" And the person telling the story look confused and says, "What? I don't know, it's just a story."