Mr. Stitch (7 page)

The man leapt forward, and Beckett screamed as a hideous, shrieking, twisting pain coiled through his arm. The agony brought him to his knees and caused the muscles in his fingers to clench—the gun went off, but the bullet went wild, tearing a chunk of stone and plaster from a far wall. His hand knotted into a fist, Beckett found he couldn’t release the trigger to fire again, couldn’t even let go of the gun…

Teeth gnashing the madman fell on him, frenetic fingers clutching, as he tried to secure a grip, tried to bite a chunk out of Beckett’s face. The coroner tucked his chin down, tried to keep his head low, as he struggled to tear the gun free from his frozen hand.

Gorud sprang forward then, leaving the lantern on the ground as he snatched at one of the madman’s arms. Using momentum to make up for his lack of mass, the therian managed to spin the human around and off of Beckett, then, still holding tight, dropped low and curled up, sending the dream-poisoned gendarme rolling over his back and into the darkness. The man crashed painfully to the ground, but was on his feet again in a second. Gorud howled, great teeth bare, prepared to bite.

Beckett held his clenched hand up and fanned the hammer of his Feathersmith with his good left hand. The gunshots were miniature explosions, again and again as the massive revolver punched holes in the stranger’s body, sending him staggering into the far wall. He opened his mouth and stretched it wide; for a moment, Beckett thought he saw that strange, toothy flower of a mouth again, before it was obscured by the colored spots left behind by the Feathersmith’s muzzle flash.

There was silence, then, broken by James’ sudden, furious spectral knocking. “All right?” Gorud asked him, over the noisy rattling.

“I can’t…can’t let go of the gun,” Beckett grunted, the pain in his arm brought tears to his eyes. “I can’t…” With one last heroic effort, he managed to lever the revolver from his right hand. The freed fingers immediately closed up, thought the pain remained. Panic surfaced too, as the sense that the muscles in his hand had been twisted around each other violated his body’s sense of integrity. “Damn it, James!” Beckett shouted. “I can’t understand you!”

The rapping continued, seeming to take on a panicked, hysterical edge to it. An alarm? A warning?

Gorud heard it, too. “Someone’s coming.”

“No,” Beckett said, a sudden realization dawning. “Someone’s getting out.” He groaned and lurched to his feet. “Shit. Come on.”

Gorud quickly grabbed the lantern, its light swinging nauseatingly across the walls, the hallway seeming to roll back and forth like the deck of a ship. The ground pitched wildly, and Beckett gripped his oar tightly, falling to his knees on the deck of the longboat. Up ahead, far, too far ahead, Fletcher’s cigar pulsed dim and red in the dark. He turned to look at Beckett, thorny green vines crawling from the black holes where his eyes were, and then his whole shape dissolved into a pale nimbus of light, revealing another man. A stranger, stumbling down the stairs at the end of the hall, trailing a thick smear of black blood and an aura of half-formed dream images—smiling faces, women with sultry eyes, spiders with long, snaking tales and hands with fingertips made of ice.

Beckett fired, left-handed, missed. He fired again, and the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. “Damn it!” He ran after the man, outpacing Gorud, whose lantern cast the coroner’s shadow ahead of them.
It doesn’t matter, I know where he’s going,
Beckett thought has he plunged into the dark, opening his revolver and stuffing it into the crook of his right arm while he fumbled with the bullets in his pocket, trying to reload. The old coroner crashed down the stairs, nearly falling, tumbling into the open receiving area, in time to see the poisoned man flee into the fading afternoon light that had crept in through the building’s devastated entryway.

“No, no,” Beckett muttered, “Come on.” He tried to press a last bullet into its chamber, but dislodged the revolver. It fell to the ground with a clank, and scattered its ammunition across the floor, bullets vanishing into the scattering of shadows. “No!” He dropped to his knees, gasping as he felt the joint in his right leg explode, trying to ignoring the screaming pain as he searched for a bullet, just one bullet to load into the weapon. Something, anything. Gorud appeared beside him, nimble fingers playing across the debris-littered floor.

Driven by the violent, churning engine of fever-dreams that had grown in his heart, exploding outwards as radiation from the oneiric explosion had corroded the delicate partitions of his mind, the raving gendarme ran. The light burned at his eyes, but he pushed himself towards it as new, strange senses that itched about his skin told him of other minds and other pairs of eyes, and the new, blooming, degenerate and venomous lust drew him on, demanded that he vomit his stomach of poison and bile into their minds, to free them from the husks of rotting flesh into which they had suffered the misfortune of being born. He fled into the afternoon light, and looked out upon the looking eyes that saw him.

The thunder of gunfire stopped him short, and he didn’t bother to look down as he felt his dreams bleed free of his wounds. He felt his body dissolve into meat and filth, and the new strange minds inside his mind wondered if the world would still be there when he left it.

Chretien [Crabtree-Daior] has come to me with a new project. He is of a mind with me regarding the nature of true Blasphemy, and is enthusiastic in his work, but misguided in his direction. Certainly, the ichor is a fascinating substance, but simply reinvigorating dead tissue is an insufficient means to create life as life was created. It is not the composition of a thing that makes it live, but the way the thing behaves: autonomously, with sensibility and awareness. That is the new life—not the demands of flesh perfected, but mind unencumbered by the demands of flesh at all.

I will enter into this project with him, but I must think more on the core truth of it.

--from the journal of Harcourt Wolfram, 1785

“
All right,” Beckett called, from the dark, bombed-out shell of the slaughterhouse. “It’s me. It’s Beckett. Don’t shoot, all right?” He heard a sound like affirmation, and then limped into the last dregs afternoon sun. The air was bitterly cold now, the icy night threatening to fall on the city like an avalanche.

The last of his veneine high washed away, leaving a thousand little agonies in his limbs. His right leg felt like someone had smashed the knee with a hammer. His right hand felt like it had been tied up in torn, tangled knots. Beckett focused on the bitter thirst for veneine in the back of his throat.
Another shot,
he thought.
Just get to the coach, and take a shot
. He lurched past the dead gendarme, brushed past Valentine, who stood just beyond the exit, silver-plated revolvers smoking, an unreadable expression on his face.

Beckett slumped in the coach and if the men outside were talking he couldn’t hear it. The sounds of the world were drowned out by the pounding in his ears, blood throbbing in his head like his veins would burst. He fumbled beneath the seat for his kit, and struggled to use the syringe with just one hand.

He had to hold the needle in his teeth while he pulled his sleeve up, exposing inflamed red veins and a constellation of tiny pink wounds; the shirtsleeve fell back into place the second he let go in order to grab the vial of veneine, and Beckett almost screamed with frustration.

“Here.” It was Gorud. The therian had followed him in to the coach, and Beckett hadn’t even noticed. The simian creature took the vial and syringe in his strong, dexterous fingers. Beckett pulled his right sleeve up, and Gorud shook his head. “No. Other arm.”

The coroner nodded, and scraped his left sleeve up with his crippled hand. The skin was less damaged here; only a few pink pinpricks showed livid on his pale skin, and then blood vessels seemed less damaged. Deftly, the therian gripped Beckett’s wrist, found a vein, and made the injection. He used the syringe precisely; no blood washed back through the needle.

It took a moment for the warmth of the veneine to spread about his body, and the relief was an incalculable joy to him. The pounding in his head receded, the aches faded. His hand began to relax and he flexed his fingers, mercifully, narcotically unconcerned by the cracks and pops he heard. He smelled saltwater then, and imagined rivulets of brackish fluid dribbling down the walls inside the coach, leaking in from the doors, pooling at his feet.

“This is dreamsnake venom,” Gorud said. “This is too much.”

“I—” Beckett began, then broke off. The absence left by the veneine-banished ringing in his ears was filled with a familiar voice.

“—not going in,” Valentine was saying. “If he wanted to talk to you, he’d be talking to you. He doesn’t. Now. Move back, before I move you.”

The veneine was warm and rich and sweet, filling his mind with honey, dragging his eyelids down, soothing his battered body. Beckett wanted to lie down in the back seat and sleep. Instead, he raised his voice.

“It’s all right, Valentine.” The old coroner levered himself to his feet again, while the therian watched, silent. “It’s all right. I’m coming out.” He sighed and shivered in the cold despite the drug. He found Valentine standing, arms crossed, outside the coach. The Moral Responsibility officer was standing cross from him, huffing importantly. “You. Edly. Edder.”

“Edelred.”

“Good. Where’s Skinner?”

“
Miss
Skinner went home, where she belongs. You are fully-equipped with knocker support,” he gestured towards James, who stood off to the side, eyes covered in a band of silver, mouth twisted in a sour grimace. “There is absolutely no need to contribute to the constant erosion of our moral bedrock that employing a woman—”

“Can I ask you something?” Beckett asked, his voice suddenly good-natured. He knew he should be angry, should glower and glare and growl, and all that, but just couldn’t find it in himself to do that right now. He was suffused with a sense of well-being, and had no desire to disturb that. “Do you believe all that, that you’re saying? I mean,” he leaned in close to the Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree, “when they found you. To put you on the Committee, did they just ask around for men who were uncomfortable thinking about women? Or did they look around for sycophant cousins, who’d parrot any line of bullshit they were given if they thought it meant getting some crumbs from the Emperor’s table?”

“I—”

“Never mind!” Beckett grinned, such an unexpected and appalling gesture that even Valentine took a step back. “I don’t really care! Valentine, come with me.”

“Mr. Beckett,” Edelred Gorgon-Ennering-Crabtree spluttered. “I mean. Inspector Beckett. May I remind you that I am a member of an Esteemed Family?”

Beckett turned back to him, no longer grinning. His missing eye, the bleeding black rents on his face where his flesh had faded from sight, the glittering white teeth added up to a particularly gruesome expression nonetheless. “You may.”

“Well,” said Edelred. “I’ve got a job to do, too, Mr. Beckett, and that means sending your woman home. Mr. Ennering is your assigned knocker. You will use him for any future engagements. Do I make myself clear?”

“No,” Beckett said, his voice dangerously quiet. “No, you don’t. Because it sounds like you’re giving me orders. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

“I have the authority,” whispered Edelred. “To have you removed from your position. Is
that
clear enough for you?”

His temper had nearly made its way back through the drug, and Beckett found himself on the verge of saying precisely what Edelred could do with his authority, and considering also adding a few comments about what Edelred must have had removed in the first place to take a position with Moral Responsibility. He held his tongue when he saw Mr. Stitch.

The huge reanimate was shambling down Augre Street, and if it was bothered by the cold, or the situation, or anything else, there’d be no way to tell. Its grotesque, patchwork face was just as impassive as ever, the brass-ringed lenses of its eyes giving away nothing more than their constant sense of intense interest. Its limbs moved deliberately and awkwardly, careful with its mismatched joints, but covered ground quickly because of its long legs.

“Beckett.” It said at last, in its tortured whisper of a voice. “Report.”