Arcane II (29 page)

Soon the steel-foil skin would warp, causing more leaks at the riveted seams. It was only a matter of time before
The Lavinia
, the finest privately-owned craft of its type in all of the New World, succumbed to the flames.

At one point, a cockpit window opened. The head and shoulders of one hijacker, it might have been Penderghast, emerged for an instant before a billow of black smoke from inside reached out and engulfed him like a clutching hand. Just then an incendiary flash blew out the rest of the glass. It was a long second before the concussion reached the parapet where Ostraander stood, and by then, flames poured from every window.

Beneath the keen edge of the ornamental dirk given him upon his retirement from the Royal Danish Air Corp, the hempen fibers of the mooring line gave grudgingly. Before long the wrist-thick line separated with a snapping
swish
, and the house lurched back and rolled precariously. Something fell in a room below with a wooden
crunch
and the tinkle of glass or china.

The sails had been entirely consumed, so it was only the leaking gasses that fed the fire now, but soon, he knew, the paper-thin shell would burn through and the fire would find the fuel it so hungrily sought.

Even as he entertained the thought, the craft shuddered, and a fountain of cerulean flame sprouted like a weird flower from her port flank. The sound reached Ostraander a long moment before the hot wind: a groaning protest of superheated metal and gluttonous fire. The airship dropped ponderously at first, like a silk handkerchief on a fresh breeze.

It was as though time had solidified into a kind of gel—a perfectly clear moment, stretched and dragged out to its utmost extreme. An interminable heartbeat passed and then everything snapped back into motion, and the twisted hulk plummeted the last hundred yards into the endless horizon of jade-green waters. A cloud of steam filled the air above where she’d met her end, already falling behind the steadily drifting house.

The lonely hiss of
The Lavinia’s
end reached Dun Leah House ages later like a warning from some unseen and terrible serpent, just before its deadly strike.

***

[Dr. Templesmith’s journal]

-23 May 1863-

The boy is wounded as much in mind as in body. It could only be madness, his desperate excavation in the cellar, never mind the self-mutilation. As to possible causes, speculation is all we have, and that is less than worthless. His dreadful wounds themselves and the possibility that they might turn septic are more than enough to occupy me. I cannot imagine what could possibly have ripped the skin from his leg so. I have my own suspicions as to where his missing parts might be, but I’ll not put them down here.

The water samples from the first week have by now settled quite clear, each with a layer of spongy-looking silt at the bottom. Those from the second are more brown, and cloudy still. And this week has a grey-blue tint and an almost tangible look to it, as if one could pinch a dollop of it right out of the glass and stand it jiggling on the table. The most recent tests revealed that the salinity has increased so that the water gathered from the now-bottomless cellar is, more or less, seawater.

Only a handful of days adrift and we’ve reached the sea? Impossible, of course; and yet, when all possible explanations are exhausted, isn’t the impossible all that remains? There are thousands of miles of waterfalls, canals, locks, and dams between Marquette and the sea. A fast-moving boat might cover the distance in a week or so, if there was nothing to slow it down, but a drifting house? Besides, even with a lookout constantly on duty, we haven’t sighted land since the night of the flood. If this is a river, it is wider than the Amazon. If it
is
Lake Superior, than it has somehow become salinated and developed a fierce current, and even then, the complete absence of land makes no sense whatsoever.

The other possibility is that the proverbial mountain has indeed come to Mohammed—that perhaps the sea rose to meet us, swallowing up damns and waterfalls and everything else along the way. Equally impossible, of course: to raise sea level even a foot would take years of rain, decades of melting ice, and Lake Superior itself is more than five hundred feet above sea level. But the water does not lie, though it may make of truth something alien and utterly unrecognizable.

I continue taking samples, and we all continue to struggle against the incipient madness of knowing the end,
some
end, must be approaching. We can’t simply float on forever. Maybe Roderick is only the first of us to break.

I should not wonder if his mind has been overtaxed by the events of the last fortnight, leading to some violent rupture in his psyche. Perhaps the strict indoctrination of his Jesuit training left him somehow vulnerable to such damage—I cannot say. Healing the mind is beyond my scope. If I can keep him alive long enough to be examined by a doctor of psychiatry, he might yet have some chance of recovering his wits.

Again he wakes. I must tend to him.

***

[Unsigned, undated Ms. presumably penned by Madame Tessier]

There are no spirits here. No ghosts, no echoes, no lingering shades of human longing, love, or rage. Nothing. I’ve tried everything to call them to us. For the first time in my life, it is as if what I can see and touch and hear is all there is. Like a medieval painting that lacks any sense of depth on the canvas, the surface is the sum of this place. I’ve always envied those who cannot hear the dead, always thought I’d relish an escape from the clamor. Now I find that it is lonely beyond bearing.

I am a stowaway on a ship never intended to be a ship, and which seems even more surprised by its predicament with each passing day. I imagine we’re making better time since the cellar dropped out, though the house has definitely lost some stability (and doesn’t “making better time” imply a destination?). If Reliene was still here, she’d be sicker than ever, poor girl. I’d say it was a mercy, whatever happened to her, except that I saw the seminarian when they brought him out of the cellar, and I heard of his dreadful injuries. I cannot believe that mercy could go about in such a cruel guise. Though of course Reliene may simply have drowned; perhaps she’d gone swimming, since there is not much of a current in the cellar, at least not at the surface. But could even someone as bold as she step willingly down into that bottomless dark?

I’ve always thought that it isn’t dying that would be so bad, no matter the pain involved. Dying is an end, and though we might dread it, when it arrives it’s over, and that’s that. The devil is in the knowing. I can’t even think on it without sweating.
Knowing
that Death is coming.
Knowing
that there is nothing to be done—no surgeon to do it if there was—for me,
that
would be the rub. We’re all dying from the moment we slide from the womb—some of us just take longer to finish what we start. Knowing that is part of what we call maturity; it is the awareness of the finite nature of our existence itself that reminds us that we—our bodies, at any rate—are merely temporary, and are therefore precious beyond all measure.

What would horrify me would be
seeing
that it was too late. Like some soldier, looking down at where the saber just unlaced his gut like a lady’s corset, spilling the tangled contents out in his lap. Looking at that, you’ve got to know that, without question, you’re finished. But you aren’t dead, and
that’s
what scares me so. Not the death, but the realization of it; reaching for your legs and finding only torn up grass and mud wetted with your life’s blood.

I don’t want to see it coming. But I don’t know how I can do anything else stuck on this damn raft of a house. I can’t begin to guess whether Reliene saw it coming or not. You’d think with all the time I’ve spent dealing with my clients’ dead, I’d be on better terms with Death herself, but She is too alien to ever grow accustomed to. Think of the undertaker who spends day after day up to his elbows in Her handiwork—how
he
must fear his end.

Yesterday I passed a window someone had left open at the end of the third floor hallway: a great sea bird of some sort was just sitting there on the sill. Ugly as sin, like the unholy mating of a gull and an alligator, or a pelican and a jackal. If I’d had a gun, like the young men on guard at the stairs, I’d have blasted it from feather to fluff. Having that misshapen thing inside—even
almost
inside—makes me itchy. But what it appears to
mean
is the real affront—what it might say about just where this infernal current is carrying us.

The gull-thing is only a mocking reminder of what, I think, none of us can understand or entirely accept. At least it’s alive—at least it’s new—rather than being “of the house” as the rest of us are; that means there’s still
something
out there besides us. That the rest of the world is still out there somewhere—it’s just lost, or we are. Yet, is it
our
world? Nothing like that sharp beaked, toothy thing has ever appeared in any cataloging of species—perhaps in some medieval bestiary or conjurer’s grimoire, but never in
our
science.

It is a hell, wherever we are. Perhaps we’re already dead and it just hasn’t sunk in. If so, I‘ll have to re-assess my notion of what about Death is most terrible, not to mention my beliefs about what comes after—what a disappointment
that
would be. No, I would rather soldier on believing myself and my companions merely doomed in this existence—that something better, or at least different, waits beyond the veil.

***

[Dr. Templesmith’s journal]

-26 May 1863-

There are times, especially in these small hours, when the motion of the house is more noticeable because there are fewer distractions, and every groan of a protesting beam or shifting rafter echoes through the darkened rooms, that I wonder why I write at all. The only answer I can manage is that I do so because I must—because
someone
must. If we somehow escape this fate—if we return to the world, and this entire experience fades like some bad dream, a mere nagging presence in a cobwebbed mind-corner, then this journal will seem fantastical. If we never reach land, never leave this wretched house—if we all perish and no one remains to tell what happened, then these words (though just as likely never to be seen) may be the only way any of us will survive in any manner or even have existed at all.

I also wonder if perhaps it is possible that
I
am mad. Could this all be simply an elaborate hallucination of my own fashioning? Could I, at any moment, awaken in some wretched asylum, locked away in a padded room, head shorn, limbs restrained to stop me gouging out my own eyes? Would that be worse?

My patient is lost. I treated his wounds for a week and more, and he seemed to be avoiding infection far better than I’d dared hope. I watched him for the ordinary signs—fever, swelling, the honeyed stench of gangrene—but what I failed to take into account was the bizarre genesis of his injuries. I had, of course, lost all hope of salvaging his sanity—he was simply too badly deranged. Yet I operated under the assumption that, horrific though they were, his injuries would respond to treatment in an ordinary fashion.

The rash was difficult to even notice at first. I had him bathing in heated saltwater each night to keep the wounds clean and draining. It was after one of these soaks that I first noticed the bumps. A field of blisters covered his inner thigh and spread up and through his pubic hair to sprinkle his belly almost to the naval. The raw flesh of his leg and foot were inflamed, too. Before putting him to bed, I treated the rash with a sulfur ointment, rinsed the leg with fresh water, and bandaged it again.

By morning he had grown worse: his skin was red as a lobster from nipples to knees, and though the bumps had disappeared, the epidermis had scaled over and flaked away like confetti when touched. He sobbed and scratched at it incessantly, snowing dead tissue. Under the dressing, his leg appeared unchanged from the night before. I had Molly scrub the bathtub with lye, and then we soaked him in cold seawater to soothe the itching. After two hours in the water, he seemed to be feeling better. Upon examination, however, it was clear that his condition had not improved.

The blisters had returned, and they covered him like some bumpy swim costume. The rash did not appear especially sensitive, at least not immediately. As the skin dried, however, the bumps once again receded, and the itchiness and flaking returned with a vengeance. Finally, we had to drag him back to the tub to stop him tearing at his skin with his ragged nails.

Only in the water was he comfortable (I suppose that should have warned me), though it certainly did nothing to stop the spread of the rash. By evening his entire body was aflame with tiny, fluid-filled blisters—every part of him, in fact, except the flayed leg and foot, which remained swollen, but lacking an epidermal layer, had no blisters. He’d sunk so low in the tub that only the tip of his nose showed, and frequently he slipped entirely under. Each time, I readied myself to pull him up, but always he resurfaced—at least his long nose did.

Though the rash had thus far spread incrementally, it advanced to the next stage that evening all at once, as if at some silent command. I was reading one of Gough’s many tomes on spiritualism, and I looked up from my book to see Roderick sitting up, grinning, his flesh obscenely red in the lamplight. The water in the tub had gone all pale and cloudy, as if someone had poured a pitcher of milk into it. He glistened unnaturally, and when I saw why, I gasped and stumbled back, nearly falling over my chair.

The blisters had burst, and from the red dot of each deflated lesion, sprouted... something. At first I took them for hairs, and my mind immediately started shuffling through diseases that involve abnormal hair growth. But even as my rational mind was thus occupied, I realized that what I saw was nothing so pedestrian. They were, for want of a better term,
cilia
. They looked like the ends of tiny worms groping blindly about. As fine as the fuzz on a newborn baby’s cheek, they might easily be mistaken for hairs but for their incessant motion. It was at once horrible and mesmerizing. They glistened wetly, each minute protuberance reflecting the lamplight at different and ever-changing angles—his flesh appeared to swim over his frame. And still that eerie smile, like the rictus of a lipless burn victim.