The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

FOURTY NINE M's Fortress

While in his excessively muscled bestial form, Edward Hyde had never before felt intimidated. Now, however, he started back from the huge and monstrous thing that Dante had become. The lieutenant's metamorphosis left him in a horrific form that would have made even a prehistoric carnivore tremble.

His face still rippling and writhing from the agonies of the change, the Dante-beast loomed up, and up— then he struck. The blow he landed knocked his opponent backward across the mezzanine. Hyde slammed into a wall, smashing whole stone blocks into gravel, and fell to the floor, stunned and drooling.

The Dante-beast lumbered forward to pummel him again.

After Captain Nemo had sent the freed scientists fleeing with their hostage family members, he rushed back to the pillared mezzanine to help his fellow League member.

In his Nautilus, Nemo had seen awesome sights that few men alive had witnessed: sunken cities, undersea mountains and volcanoes, a horrific giant squid. But when he saw what Dante had become, he froze in disbelief.

The Fantom's lieutenant was now twelve feet tall, tremendously deformed, engorged with muscle and sinew. His spine had twisted, as if unable to support so much power and fury. His face, no longer even remotely human, was swollen with popped blood vessels and spiny facial hair that grew like a forest of bristles.

Hyde struggled to his feet just in time to meet Dante's next charge. The larger beast-man stormed at him. The force of his roundhouse punch sent the League member careening into a thick support pillar. The stone column cracked, teetered, and fell, bringing down a precarious arch. Hyde fell amid a shower of stones and rubble that blocked the exit passage.

A thick arm knocked the heavy blocks away, and Hyde hauled himself out of the rock pile. The Dante-beast immediately waded toward him and began his merciless assault once again.

Though he was being battered to a pulp, Hyde broke the attack and swung a powerful uppercut. "Come on, then, if you fancy a ruckus." The blow slammed the Dante-beast back into a structural column, toppling it and collapsing another section of the ceiling.

As Hyde continued to advance, Nemo joined him, a wicked scimitar held in his right hand, his left raised and ready to assist with the fight. Despite his martial arts skills and the curved blade, the captain looked absurdly small in the company of the two behemoths.

Hyde stopped him with an outstretched hand as large as Nemo's head. "No, no. Leave this to me." He cracked his knuckles. "This will be my pleasure."

Reeling to his feet again, the Dante-beast charged at Hyde. Hyde ran back at him. They looked like two stampeding rhinos.

On one voyage when he had visited mysterious Japan, Nemo had seen a match of enormously fat Sumo wrestlers. Although this colossal struggle brought back the memory, that contest had been a mere child's game in comparison.

Hyde and Dante collided like two locomotives, giving Nemo a ringside seat at their gargantuan battle.

Standing over his bed, Dorian Gray turned from Mina's body. She lay sprawled, impaled on the thin sword. Gray sighed wistfully. "You were so lovely."

"Why thank you." Mina stood and pulled the sword from her chest.

Gray whirled in disbelief.

"You stole my heart once a long time ago, Dorian. This time you missed."

She somersaulted from the bed and skewered Gray with his own rapier. The energy of the impact drove him backward, and they hit the wall together. Mina added extra force, shoving the point of the sword with all her vampiric strength.

Then she backed away and dusted her hands, as if trying to wipe away the contamination of his touch. Gray tried to move, squirming left and right, but found that he was firmly affixed to the wall, helpless.

Mina ran to the other side of the room and snatched up his wrapped painting, which still leaned against the wall. She turned it toward him.

"Mina," Gray said warily, then grew more frantic. He tugged at his cane-sword to free himself, but to no avail. He was stuck like an insect pinned to a mounting board.

With razor-sharp nails, Mina tore at the burlap covering. "You spoke once before of wanting to atone, Dorian. You wanted to face your inner demon."

Gray's terror grew with each shred of cloth that she peeled away from his painting.

"Well, here he is!" Mina exposed the entire picture of Dorian Gray.

In the painting, Grays face — barely recognizable as a corrupted version of his youthful, handsome features— was wizened with age, leprous, oozing, swollen, and rotted from the accumulation of decades of evil debauchery. It was a symphony of horrors wrapped in an approximation of human form, carrying the weight of far more age and poison and decrepitude than any one person could endure.

Gray was transfixed by the true appearance of his soul — the last thing he would see. As he hung pinned to the wall by his cane-sword, his perfect, youthful face began to crease and peel. He gasped, writhed, screamed, while his body aged and rotted, until he took on the precise appearance of the painting — its degeneration, the cracked and peeling texture.

Mina looked away, her face resolute, yet her eyes brimmed with regretful tears. Dorian Gray withered and shriveled and finally died as nothing more than a twisted mummy.

At the same time, the image on his portrait became younger, restored to the likeness Mina remembered… and loved.