Arcane II (30 page)

Naturally, I got him out of the tub and had it drained and cleaned again. I was astonished to see that his injured leg was covered with the same cilial layer, and even more densely. He was sensitive to touch, even on the heels of his feet, so he stood there, naked and dripping (and subcutaneously writhing) throughout the process. He was unresponsive, except for small motions to avoid being touched. He soon began to moan, a chillingly animal sound. I noticed then that the motions of the hair-like structures had slowed, and in some places had stopped entirely. He arched his back and bent and twisted, though he appeared unwilling to actually scratch at himself.

Before we had even gotten the last buckets of seawater upstairs, he practically flew into the tub, nearly knocking Tarquin to the ground. He slid down until he was as fully covered as the water would permit, and continued to moan until we had filled it the rest of the way. This time, not even his nose broke the surface. I waited fifteen seconds, twenty, thirty, almost a minute, before wrenching him up and into the air. He did not gasp. Indeed, he did not take a breath at all. And yet, he was responsive, struggling clumsily to escape my grip and return to the water. Back in the tub, the cilia could be seen to wave much more vigorously than before, and in something like coordinated patterns. I watched him remain submerged for three full minutes without breath.

Had I access to my own library, I would have immediately turned to Lambshead, but as it was, I can do nothing but record my thoughts along with what data I have been able to gather. Impossible as it sounds, I believe that his body, his very skin, has been
colonized
by something akin to a coral, sponge, or anemone—some liminal organism straddling the line between the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Though each pore would seem to play host to a discrete cilium, it may be that they function in concert to form something greater, something which operates with a single consciousness. The question is whether Roderick as we knew him still lives or if he’s simply become a raft of sorts for this mysterious organism.

***

[Unsigned fragment of letter, presumably penned by Ms. Morden]

I have this recurring dream, Camille. One that I’ve hoped, so far in vain, working would help rid me of. There is a woman in it I must assume to be Reliene, since the dream began the very night of her disappearance.

Somehow I know beyond doubt (the way we do in dreams) that she has been through something truly horrific. In the dream she comes creeping up the cellar stairs. I’m terrified, but everyone else in the house is totally oblivious—they can’t seem to hear or see me. It takes so very long for her to reach the top, and the waiting is so terrible. I can’t help opening the door. Every time I do it, and every time it’s the same ghastly spectacle waiting there.

What could Reliene have done to cost her her very skin? The gruesome sight has branded itself upon my memory, and I thought at first that putting it on a canvas would let me be rid of it. It was sickeningly easy to achieve the perfect flayed red for the exposed muscle tissue. Cobalt and a hint of Venetian Red rendered the blood vessels in painful detail. I paint her not as I see her every night standing in the cellar door, but instead reclining, somehow at ease on the fainting couch in my studio. All from memory and imagination, of course, but having the musculature so lewdly exposed makes it easy to achieve a lifelike posture. I suppose I thought to alter the memory by changing details, somehow making it all less horrific.

I cannot, in truth, be certain that it even
is
Reliene. If only I could forget the terrible blankness of that face—all expression, identity, and humanity peeled away as easily as one might peel a ripe tangerine. How profoundly naked we are without the soft shell we wear—how utterly terrible is the beauty beneath. Stripped of all our delicate armor we are just us, bone and muscle, skeletons dressed up in so much meat.

Enough. Camille, when we parted you said I was never to contact you again, but I find myself unable to help it. For a distraction from all of this, I reach back sometimes to an August morning in the gardens at home, the buzzing of bees and the green-gold scent of honey and sunshine in our hair. The dancing reflections of the day-lit sky fractured by a thousand thousand oak leaves in your eyes, so like my own that they could be. We shared a womb, Camille—surely we were never meant to be separated by something so petty (I’m sorry, Reliene, but it was). So I write to you, for myself, hoping these letters never find their way to your hands. With all that I am, I wish you anything but this existence.

***

[Water-damaged fragment from Dr. Templesmith’s journal, date unknown]

[MS. torn]
thout a microscope. I have sketched them below. As can be seen, the cilia have rooted themselves quite deeply into his flesh. It appears that the base of each of the tiny organisms acts like a vine, creeping beneath the epidermis, attaching itself to blood vessels, muscle tissue, etc.
[MS. blotted]
vigorous as ivy roots,
[MS. blotted]
eerie and beautiful, really.

[MS. blotted]
out of this house and back to the world
[MS. blotted]
furor in the scientific
[MS. blotted]
I present
[MS. blotted]
exotic new parasitic organism.
[MS. torn]

***

[Dr. Templesmith’s journal]

-26 May 1863-

Looking back, I see that I wrote previously that Roderick had been lost. I was mistaken. He was merely transfigured. Now, however, he is truly gone.

The night after the hatch of the cilia, I returned from fetching an evening snack to find the hallway runner soaked with seawater. As I feared, the tub was empty but for a foot or so of fluid that remained, still sloshing with the echo of his departure. The water trail led down the hall to an open window on what had been the house’s west wall. The sill was soaked, as was the wall below it, but there was no sign of anything unusual in the water two stories below. In the near-dark, however, it was impossible to see more than a dozen feet from the house.

He’d escaped.

Why he’d gone all the way down the hall, though, instead of simply opening one of the tall parlor windows remains unclear. I do know for a fact that the hall window had been open, for I’d noted the cool breeze on my way down to the kitchen. Perhaps he was, for some reason, unable to open the windows in the parlor. The lack of water on the rug near them, however, suggests he hadn’t even tried.

Is it possible he didn’t leave the house on his own? If someone (or something) had come for him from outside, wouldn’t the intruder have been forced to enter through an already open window or door, even if it did happen to be some way from the parlor? If the organisms do indeed share a collective consciousness, might it extend even beyond an individual host? The possibility is nearly more than I can stomach. And yet, strange as he has become, I don’t know whether to pity poor Roderick or envy him the opportunity to see what he will see, learn what he will learn.

***

[Water-damaged fragment from Dr. Templesmith’s journal, date unknown]

With Roderick gone, The samples of biopsie
[MS. blotted]
I have to study. They are unchanged—the cilia appear unharmed by their isolation from each other, or from their distance from
[MS. blotted]
continue to undulate and wave with a singular mind (a disconcerting sight in their seven jars).

Theorizing that the creatures may be present in the sea water, we have taken to boiling it before bathing in it. Curious that no one else became infected before Roderick.
[MS. blotted]
missing flesh allowed the organism to get a toe-hold within him. If only I had a test subject, a rat, even a dog
[MS. blotted]
could help pin down the route of infection.
[MS. blotted]
not yet prepared to mutilate myse
[MS. blotted]
wait and watch.

***

[Unsigned fragment, possibly authored by Mme Tessier.]

[MS. torn]
above the wainscoting already. Baskin organized a detail to move anything useful from the kitchen to the second floor parlor. I was not involved, of course, but it was quite the undertaking. It suits me in a perverse sort of way that this three-story mansion with all its blasted stairs is now reduced to only two stories, with most of the truly important rooms here on the second floor. Now we take our meals in a guest suite converted into a passable dining room. The setting, I must say, is far more exciting than the fare itself. It seems that beans, rice, cornmeal, and salted meat are virtually all that remain, and our cook has long since exhausted the creative possibilities of such staples.

The main stairway and the narrow servant’s stairs are under constant guard. When the waves began to break over the porch, the beautiful front doors warped terribly and could not be closed. The men jammed them shut and piled a heavy bureau and several dressers against them. The next morning, the furniture was gone, and the doors were wide open, the sea having exceeded the height of the threshold overnight. Now it covers the floor by at least a foot, miniature swells rolling right across the entranceway to lap at the lower stairs. And it is not only water that has invaded the ground floor. That first morning, the men found something in the kitchen, a fish of some sort, I suppose, which they shot. It was not added to our menu, though, and they refuse to speak of it in any detail.

There are noises down there. Sometimes a soft crooning, like a mother to a restless child—it goes on and on, changing pitches here and there, then ceasing altogether. The times when it is silent are almost worse, because the soggy
thunks
and bumps sound all the louder, not to mention the occasional thrashing, as of a large fish trapped in shallow water. The guards are armed, and take the duty in shifts, one to a stairway, while one goes back and forth to ensure that neither of the others falls asleep. With only five able-bodied men remaining, they can not be getting much sleep, but then, none of us are.

There! Splashing, punctuated by a crunch: a table or a shelf being crushed or torn apart. Now silence—not even the lullaby humming. It is not right, whatever is happening here—a blasphemy of the highest order.

***

[Loose page from Dr. Templesmith’s journal, date unknown]

Danica Morden returned this morning, after three days missing. We’d all assumed the worst, though out here, the worst possible fate, it seems, isn’t necessarily death.

She’s been flayed just as Roderick’s leg was. Danica’s injuries, however, have a more serpentine aspect, a bare strip a handbreadth wide running down over each shoulder, across one breast, around the opposite hip, and then coiling twice around her leg to disappear at the ankle. It is painful to look upon, yet almost beautiful,
[MS. blotted]
scarlet tattoo.

Margeaux Penderghast was bringing tea to the actor, Christov, who had been posted at the servants’ stair. Remarkable how quickly she turned to the handsome Russian for solace following her husband’s death in the ill-fated hi-jacking of
The Lavinia
. At any rate, according to the pair of them, they had been talking for a few moments before they were silenced by a splash from the bottom of the dark, narrow stairway. Christov raised his gun and they waited
[MS. blotted]
into the lamplight.

When nothing more transpired, they returned to their conversation. It wasn’t unt
[MS. blotted]
filtered through the narrow window at the landing that Ostraander, who had come to take over the watch, noticed the naked girl huddled there where the water meets the steps.

She must have been down there on the flooded ground floor all along. To think of her there, terrified and in agony, so close to help, yet a world away. There are always noises from below, and I find myself wondering how many of the eerie cries that we heard over the past few days might have been hers. Even worse, what if the others are down there: Roderick, Chas Blanc, Raeline, Tarquin, Derrick Pen
[MS. blotted]

[MS. blotted]
comatose. A mercy. Shock, I shouldn’t wonder, and maybe something more. She has lost a significant amount of blood, though the bleeding seems to have stopped for the moment. We have wrapped her in clean bed linens. There is little I can do. The ether is nearly gone. I doubt very muc
[MS. torn]

***

[Unsigned fragment, but reference to the author’s wheelchair suggests Mme Tessier]

Last night, there was a narwhal in the foyer. The water has swallowed several more steps, but still, it should not be so deep as
that
. I was on my way to the makeshift kitchen for a bedtime snack, and I had just rolled onto the landing where the guard watches over the main stairway, when the pale gray shape slipped through the gaping doorway. Longer than a carriage, and big around as a draft horse, the creature glided serenely to the foot of the stairs and paused, as if deciding whether or not to climb.

I must have cried out, because Gerick Ostraander, who had looked perfectly awake in his chair, jumped to his feet, his rifle falling to the carpet. The doctor arrived a moment later, just as Gerick took aim.

“Stop!” shouted the doctor, forcing the barrel up.

“The bloody hell I will,” Gerick said, fighting to free the weapon. “It’s a whale, man! Inside the house,” he continued through gritted teeth, “Besides, it’s meat!”

“Don’t you see,” the doctor began, “it’s the first thing we’ve seen that says we’re where we belong—the world we know.” He released the gun as Gerick stopped struggling. “It’s a sign...” he trailed off, glancing suddenly up at me before going on, “a sign that things might be getting better.”