Camera Obscura

by Lavie Tidhar

  She wondered how many of the grey-infected corpses had initially come here. And where had the initial infection come from? Did the Man on the Mekong, Tom Thumb's mysterious contact in the east, send other keys, other couriers? How long had the Council known – and how long had the lizards?

  She made her way through the graves slowly, her gun drawn. She was watching for the Phantom. She remembered the first time she had met Tômas. Down in the under-morgue, a young man with an unremarkable face, a face that could transform – with a hint of rouge, a false moustache, a wig, an expression, into someone else's face. He had been a murderer; a blackmailer; a thief and a robber; the Council found him highly useful and had recruited him – where and when she never knew. Just as she had been recruited, when she first came to their notice, before her travels in Vespuccia, before Lord de Winter – before her first husband, even. A brat in the under-city, who did what she could to survive… They had liked that. They had fashioned her, in their way, into a gun.

  Now she hunted a comrade; another like her; and yet nothing like her, she thought. She stalked toward Ampère's castle. As she passed a large headstone the lightning flashed and she saw the name inscribed there.

  André-Marie Ampère. So it was true, and the man's simulacra had made its home right beside its one-time owner.

  She came to the door. When she knocked there was no answer. She kicked it open. "Ampère!"

  No answer, but something moving in the darkness. Lightning flashed and the light came through the open doorway and she saw the thing on the floor.

  The automaton had been sliced open, its insides showing, gears and wheels changing even as she watched, becoming a strange, grey mist. And, as if prompted by the lightning, a blue electric light began to glow around André-Marie Ampère, spilling out from his insides. The automaton's mouth moved, but no words came out. She stepped closer.

  "I take it Tômas has already paid you a visit," she said. The thing on the floor groaned. Grey clouds spilled from its insides, and now she could see what she had missed before – there was a fragment of a green stone embedded into the automaton's stomach, the smoke and the light falling from it, growing…

  Awakening, a voice said. She took a step back. It did not quite speak. Somehow the words were in her mind. Lights, flickering. Static pictures, hovering in the mist. A camera obscura, she thought. But this was more. And it was real.

  Home…

  There was more than one voice. They sounded… lonely?

  She stared into the automaton's belly, where a sun was rising in dark space, illuminating… what?

  A vista of impossible structures, floating in space…

  "What are you?" she said.

  Worlds within worlds… old beyond time… we are ghosts, nothing to be frightened of… for ourselves, we want nothing.

  She took a step closer to the corpse; and now she was standing directly above Ampère. He was no longer moving. The machine was dead.

  "Awakening," she said, echoing them. "Why? Why now? Or…" Not now, she realised. "Three years ago. What happened?"

  A sense of a vast intelligence turning over her question, tasting it, polishing it like a stone, examining it in a dim light. No answer. Then, A signal. Chrono-spatial; anomaly; awakening; birth; child; like us not us; close – we must find it!

  "I don't understand."

  In the place you call… A vast mind rifling through a catalogue of names and meanings, searching. Oxford.

  "What happened there?"

  Again, the words dizzying her, the voices swallowing her, and she found herself bent down, her face so close to the dead machine's open belly, where the jade-green flashes seemed to shape themselves, suddenly, into the shape of a key… Birth. Multi-form intelligence infant anomalous same same different dimensional representation insufficient–

  "You don't know…"

  A shriek of anger, a sense of waiting, and she reached out to the fragment of jade, compelled to touch it–

  Her hand froze above it. She thought – the Phantom had put it there. He had killed Ampère. He had set it for her, to touch. What would it do?

  And she thought – it would make me like him.

  "No," she said. The voices silenced. The Colt was in her hand without her knowing it. She fired – again and again.

  FORTY-ONE

  What Transpired at the Montmartre Cemetery

  The grey mist dissipated. The electric corpse twitched and shook, sparks and smoke rising from Ampère's chest. His eyes bulged out, then fell altogether and rolled on the floor, leaving two empty sockets behind.

  A lifeless figure lay at her feet. The room was dark, and outside the storm had abated, the clouds slowly dispersing.

  She turned away and was sick.

  After a couple of minutes she felt better. She didn't know what lay inside Ampère's castle, and didn't want to find out. She went outside and closed the door behind her.

  Clap.

  The sound jerked her head upwards. She scanned the night, saw nothing.

  Clap. Clap. Clap.

  "Tômas."

  "Milady. Is it true you killed your first husband?"

  "Show yourself."

  "And your second?"

  She turned, round and round, searching for him. Where was the voice coming from? Her gun was in her hand. The other gun was still safely hidden in her coat, and she didn't dare reach for it…

  "We are not unlike, you and I."

  "Don't flatter yourself."

  "I was flattering you–" he laughed. "I want to show you something."

  "Then come out and show me."

  "All in good time, Milady. All in good time." The voice circled around her, invisible, unseen. "I have seen so much. There are no words to describe the things I've experienced. I have seen the universe, Cleo."

  She had not been called that in a long time… Tom, she thought. Tom Thumb had called her that, the last time she saw him alive.

  "I saw the stars of deep space," the Phantom said. She searched for him but couldn't find him. "The swirling galaxies," the Phantom said. "I have seen suns explode and life flourish where no life should be… And I have seen the lizards."

  "Oh?" she stopped, stood still. Was that a branch cracking underfoot?

  "I have seen rings in space, enormous structures, and dark ships like whales sailing between the stars. I've seen worlds beyond the world, I've seen wonders such as I can't–"

  She turned and shot. A silence, then a low, husky laugh. "Good try," Tômas said.

  "You could return with me," she said. "We can try and find a cure. Reverse you–"

  "Reverse me? I am beyond human, Cleo. I am the next step. I am better than all of you."

  "You're insane," she said.

  "And you're a fool," he said. "Do you think the Council would be grateful to you for destroying their key?" He laughed again. "It is of little consequence. It was but a fragment, a small thing. I am a key unto itself. And there is a door, too… a gateway in Asia, and its gatekeeper selling tickets to the highest bidder – who do you think that would be? France? Chung Kuo? Perhaps the Sioux Nations? Or the fat-bellied lizards and their human servants?"

  "Why do you care?"

  Circling again. Was that a shadow, moving? She fired, and the shadow dropped back. "That almost hurt," he said. Then he was closer, very suddenly, and she fired with the gun while reaching for the other, the one with the grey-metal slugs–

  And – "I don't," he said, and he was very close. She saw him then, illuminated in the moonlight, a steely-grey monster, naked now, grey swirls like living tattoos on his skin. That elongated skull, and the row of teeth that opened in a hungry smile… "I've waited a long time for this, Cleo," he said, and then he seemed to be everywhere at once and she could not reach the gun, her hands would not obey her and she tried to turn – too late – and felt an explosion of pain erupt in the back of her skull. She fell to her knees, tried to raise her gun arm but weights were dragging her down now, down into black and murky dep
ths from which she couldn't rise… Her hands fell to her sides and there was pain again, a lot of it, and she fell sideways, and into a dark abyss where no dreams came.

  Movement. Her head was aflame. Pain spread out like molten silver throughout her body. She was being carried. His hands were on her like a vice. She was dangling from his shoulder, her head almost grazing the ground. She saw tombs pass by, upside down. "Lovely Cleo," he said. "Soon, now…"

  She passed out again, mercifully.

  And awakened, to see the stars overhead, no clouds, no rain (she would have prayed for rain, craved water). The pain in her head was a dull constant sound, a hammer hitting a distant anvil.

  Notre Dame de Paris. In the ruins shadows fled from the Phantom and its prey. She stirred, trying to – trying to – she had a–

  His hand on her neck and she could no longer breathe. "Into the under-city we go, we go," he sang to her. "You and I, how pleasant it will be…"

  The fingers pressed on her throat and squeezed; she couldn't breathe…

  Darkness again.

  Going through the passages of the under-city, going through the catacombs… She thought she saw Q, hidden in a corner, watching her sadly. She tried to whisper to him, but no words came. Past fires and beggars and lizard boys, past the sorry denizens of this sorry dark world. "Not far now, my love…" he whispered, and there was pain, there was so much pain, and she sought escape in the cool and empty darkness, diving inside it, her last thought a wordless cry, an old prayer: Please don't let me wake up again.

  FORTY-TWO

  I am Pain

  "Why the cemetery?"

  "All those lovely corpses… my little garden of the dead. And that fool Ampère to store them and study them and keep quiet about my little indiscretions. You spoiled my little arrangement…"

  "The Council put you on body-snatching detail–"

  Sounds in the dark, metal sliding against metal, and she tried not to think of that. "They didn't count on you getting infected yourself?"

  "Oh, I think you'd be surprised," he said. Flames, burning metal. She bit down hard, trying to focus. "I suspect they wanted to see how it would affect me. Not just me, Milady de Winter. Another part of my job was to bring them test subjects. Little kids from the street, old women, old men, a whole crosssection of society – as long as no one would miss them. Little kids…" he said. "Like you'd once been."

  She thrust against the restraints, wanting to get at him, and he laughed. She was strapped into one of Viktor's operating tables. They were in the under-morgue, and it was locked up tight, and there were only the two of them.

  "I didn't mind," he said. "I liked it. It gave me…" He sounded thoughtful. "New abilities," he said. "I no longer needed to serve the Council. The new me had no one to serve but itself."

  "But they sent you to get Yong Li," she said. He snorted. "That sad little man… I merely reversed the operation he'd already undergone. He was a little like me, and glad not to be, I think. He was grateful for my knife."

  "But they sent you. To get the key."

  "Yes…" he said, not sounding certain.

  "But you wouldn't give it back to them."

  "I was happy," he said. "In my little garden. I was going on a long journey, you see. To another place."

  "What happened?"

  "The key was not enough. It was like the hole in a camera obscura – enough to show the image coming through, not enough to cross over. No, the gateway is only one and it is far from here, in Asia, where the fragment came from. I will be going there soon, to meet the Man on the Mekong."

  "Does he have a name?"

  "He might have had one, once. What do I care for names? I shall cut his belly open and walk through the doorway."

  "You're insane."

  "No," he said. "I am pain."

  He turned to her then. He was wearing his iron mask again, and one of Viktor's white smocks. He looked down on her. He had stripped her down to her underclothes. Her coat lay crumpled in a corner. The gun, she thought. The gun must still be there.

  It would not do her any good. It was as far as if it were the other side of a vast ocean. And now she could smell the burning metal, and above her the Phantom raised a red-hot cleaver. She strained against the straps but it was futile. Fear blossomed inside her like a fever. "The heat will cauterise the wound," he said conversationally. He had tied her up with her arms spread out, and her legs. A strap pressed her forehead down, another choked her neck. She couldn't move.

  She couldn't escape.

  "Please," she said. "Please. Don't do it."

  When she looked at his hands she could see the grey swirls intensifying, moving in the red glare of the knife. "Don't–"

  The cleaver, a butcher's tool, came down hard.

  She had screamed. For a moment, joyfully, she lost consciousness. But it returned, too soon, far too soon, and then she cried, and the pain was horrifying, it was everywhere, everywhere but in one place.

  He had cut off her right arm, just below the elbow.

  And now he showed it to her, waving it in front of her face before throwing it away across the floor. She cried, she couldn't help it. She begged him to stop, or tried to. The sounds that came from her mouth were barely human.

  "No more questions, Cleo? No more investigating, no more mystery-solving? I'm disappointed. You must have so much you want to ask me still."

  She screamed. He said, "That's not a question."

  The next time she was conscious he was pulling a needle from her arm. "This will help," he said.

  He'd picked up a surgical blade. One of Viktor's. He played with it in front of her eyes. She could no longer think. Her whole being was fear, as pure as an animal's. She shook and tried to move away and there was nowhere to go. "Perhaps… an eye?" he suggested.

  She tried to shake her head. She moaned. She tried to kick. Her whole being was shaking uncontrollably. "So I could see you better with it, my dear…" he said and laughed.

  He reached for her and stroked her hair. His hand was very close to her eyes. She closed them, praying to whatever gods or spirits there were to hear her, but none came. His thumb stroked her closed eyes. "Left… or right? What fearful symmetry you have, Cleo."

  Then he pressed, and pressed, and pressed, and the pain was worse than before, and she knew she was dying.

  "Look," he said. There was a bloodied ball in his hand, and he was waving it before her. He had just injected her again, she didn't know with what. One of Viktor's potions… to keep her alive.

  "What is a human?" he said. "How much can we reduce while we remain? Legs? Hands? Eyes and ears? What is left when all the outside appendages are taken out?"

  Her one eye moved rapidly, uncomprehending. He threw the eyeball at the wall. It slid down, and there was a circle of blood where it had hit. "That is what I wish to find out, Milady. I am so glad you've agreed to help me."

  She whimpered. She was reduced to nothing, a burning darkness, a sun flaming with pain. To live was to hurt, to suffer. Somewhere in the back of her mind Milady still existed, beyond the wall of torment, but she was dormant, hidden well behind, a tiny presence in the mindless pain.

  "I want you to see what I see," he said, earnestly. Somehow that was more frightening than anything that had come before. His hand disappeared, returned…

  Something green. It shone with its own internal light. "A fragment of a fragment," he said, and giggled. She tried to speak, to say, "No, please, please please don't don't d–"

  His hand came down. His thumb pushed into the open socket of her empty eye.

  She screamed.

  "Another injection?" he said. He sounded irritated now. She felt a needle slip into her neck, then all feeling stopped.

  "There," the Phantom said. "That's better, now."

  His thumb, pushing… There was a scraping sound. No pain, but the feel of something hard moving, grating against her skull. "Soon," he said. "Soon you'll be able to see. Really see. It is a great gift I give you, Cl
eo."

  She shivered. He ran one finger, lightly, down her cheek. "Hush now. Can you see? Can you see it yet?"