INTO THE LABYRINTH.
Jacob Aster was what someone might call quiet. He was nice, but shy, and when he did speak, people usually had no idea what he was going on about. The price to pay for brilliance, his mother had called it, back when she was alive. Brilliance--that was why he got such a nice job at Mammoth Shipping; it was why they tasked him with some of the more difficult biochemical analyses, why they trusted him to work independently. Though he didn't often talk to his coworkers--they got on fine, but he was just awkward--he had heard whisperings that some of the higher ups in the Mammoth labs were looking at him for a promotion. It was why he had volunteered to stay in the labs while the rest of Mammoth's employees filtered out to the New Year's Eve ball; they still had work to do on the recent shipment from the Crete dig. His superiors had smiled, pleasantly surprised. He was sure he'd get that promotion now.
And really, why shouldn't he? Jacob--and everyone else in this department--knew he was miles ahead of his coworkers in chemical analysis and development. When the vast anthrax scare took Mammoth by surprise, it was his formula that made the most potent vaccine. When they had received that shipment of Greek urns from the Turkey dig, had he not worked three days straight to analyze the bacteria present? He deserved a promotion, and it was high time he received it.
In precautionary suit and gloves, he removed the bovine horn from its case in the sterilized room they had set aside to study it. Something seemed to ripple through his arms. He felt strangely warm, and the brief thoughts of entitlement and anger--he deserved the promotion, the recognition; he was better than all of them; who were they to relegate him to the bottom of the labyrinthine labs while they got drunk and rubbed up against each other at the company party?--the bitterness surged up inside him, and worms or slugs or snakes seemed to burrow and slide under his skin. His forehead boiled, like bubbles of flesh were bursting underneath his mask, pushing out and up like horns. He dropped the carved horn he was holding as his stomach turned over, and when he looked down at his hands, they burst--covered in coarse brown hair and twice their natural size--out of the gloves of his suit.
His bones crunched. His skin stretched. His nostrils flattened wide against his face as pale ivory horns ripped from his forehead. In Jacob Aster's place was a ten-foot tall creature, three times as wide as a man, nostrils flaring and eyes rolling in a head shaped distinctly, horrifyingly, like a bull's. And he could only think of one place to go: the place where his keepers were gathered, the Mammoth Holiday Ball.