Camera Obscura

by Lavie Tidhar

  "You're crazy," she said, or thought she did, and he laughed. "What shall we do next?" he said. "Hmmm?" He seemed to give it some thought. In her head the alien object felt as if it were reaching inside her, as if a larva had been planted in her eye socket and was now emerging, questing out…

  The Phantom said: "An ear, perhaps? Or a leg? Not your tongue, my dear. I like to hear it when you voice your opinions – and you are ever so vocal…"

  The cleaver again. When had it come into his hands? The man in the iron mask never smiled, never changed expression. "This is so much better than with corpses," he said softly. Then the blade came down again, above her knee.

  FORTY-THREE

  Grimm

  Awakening. Pain. It came and went in waves; she rode them, cresting higher and higher. Thinking: no more no more no more please please please no more kill me–

  Blinking her one eye. Darkness. Silence. The monster was hiding, was waiting to pounce. Please please please don't–

  Calling on old gods of a place she had long forgotten and never believed in. But a child believes. Once again she was that child; alone and afraid in the dark, in the city, hiding from predators, fearing every footstep. Knowing they were coming, that you couldn't run forever, that sooner or later it would happen, and they–

  His voice, in the distance. Speaking, the corresponding voice echoing strangely. Communicating with someone through a Tesla set, the little part of her mind that was not yet insane thought.

  She couldn't move. And the pain was a part of her now.

  Her leg was gone. So was her arm. She was no longer strapped in, in those two places. There was nothing left to strap in.

  Something moved in the darkness and she almost screamed, but wouldn't, no, she wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

  Only it was not the Phantom.

  A familiar shape. Slithering quietly, cautiously, along the cold stone floor.

  A familiar insectile head. The quiet hiss and whirr of gears.

  Grimm.

  She closed her eye. When she opened it Grimm was still there, moving towards her. It raised itself up. Grimm's soft metal tongue hissed out, touched her skin like a kiss.

  "Oh, Grimm," she said, or tried to. "Oh, Grimm."

  Grimm's mouth found the first of the leather straps. Grimm's tongue licked it, and the leather hissed. Her little familiar was eating the straps. "Hurry," she whispered. "Hurry!"

  The next time Grimm's mouth moved a drop of acid fell on her hand. She bit her lips until the blood flowed. She would not make a sound.

  Beyond the small area of the surgery the voices were fading and she knew the Phantom would be coming back. "Hurry," she said, and then, with a final hiss of Grimm's tongue, her body was free, and her arm.

  With a clumsy hand she loosened the neck strap, then the head. She was clawing, panting, desperately fumbling with the remaining strap, the one that had held bound both of her legs, and now…

  She fought the strap and tried very hard not to look at the empty place where her leg had been.

  She heard his footsteps. Grimm slithered away. Then she was free. She tried to stand and of course couldn't. She fell down on the hard floor.

  The Phantom appeared. "What are you–?" he said, and then he laughed. She dragged herself forward, one-armed, her one leg kicking. Slowly she progressed, her one eye fixed on the coat lying a few feet away.

  "You are like a strange new creature," the Phantom said. "And I have created you. Crawl, little fish. Where are you going?"

  She kicked, and pushed, clawing her way one inch at a time,

  leaving a slimy trail of blood against the stone. He was striding towards her then, not hurrying, enjoying the wait.

  She was almost there.

  And then so was he, and he kicked her, and her ribs flamed in pain and she rolled from the impact–

  Her body found the coat–

  And there was something hard inside, a metal pipe, the Toymaker's curious gun–

  The Phantom's next kick found her head, broke teeth. Blood filled her mouth. She could barely see – his ghostly outline was above her, descending with a flash of metal–

  A knife, descending–

  She fumbled in the coat, one-handed, reaching for that inside pocket, and her fingers closed on the smooth cylinder of the gun–

  The knife was coming down very fast–

  She rolled, or tried to. The knife grazed her face, sliced a part of her ear–

  She couldn't release the gun from the coat!

  The knife rose, began to come down again–

  She watched the expressionless iron mask and the blade, afraid, unable to think–

  The knife whispered as it cut through air, towards her, and–

  She fired, blindly, through the coat's material.

  There was a burning smell.

  The knife clattered to the floor.

  The Phantom took a step back, and then another. He looked down.

  On his chest, an explosion of grey. The moving shapes resembled nothing, suggested everything. They were volcanoes and hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. The grey flooded him, and she fired again, and he stumbled and fell to his knees.

  He looked at her through the iron mask. He raised his arms, examined his hands. His fingers were melting, and he screamed. The grey engulfed him, like molten silver, burning.

  The gun dropped from her fingers and she fell back, knowing she was dying, welcoming it. To die would be to never again experience pain. Dimly she was aware of Grimm beside her, Grimm's dry tongue on her cheek. "Oh, Grimm," she said, or wanted to. "It had all been–"

  Then her eye closed, and she knew nothing else.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The New Translation of Lady de Winter

  Darkness, cold, a blessed silence. She could no longer feel her body. Was she dying? Had she died?

  A sense of calm, so wonderful. But something else, intruding. A feeling as though she was moving.

  Or being moved.

  She blinked an eye. She saw faces above her, as distant as moons. No longer afraid – she felt wonderful, in fact. So wonderful… She giggled, or tried to.

  Voices, from an immeasurable distance: "Close to death– nothing we can do– the drugs won't work forever."

  She could not distinguish between the voices, could not tell who was speaking. She tried to tell them she was fine, really, she was, but they wouldn't listen.

  "Build– radical surgery– she wouldn't thank you– need her– go to– ridiculous– shock alone would–"

  She could hear the words but they made no sense. She giggled again, then felt the world disappear.

  … and reappeared again. The sense of moving intensified. Sounds in the distance, the motion of water, and she thought – we're crossing the Seine. Voices, speaking far away: "Why is she not dead?"

  Another: "Injected."

  "With what?"

  The second voice was Viktor's. "My own modified Hyde formula."

  "She should have died of the shock. And loss of blood." The voice, too, familiar. Colonel Xing – why were the two of them together?

  "The Hyde formula is… rather special. It was very clever of him to use it. A great compliment to myself, really."

  She would have shot him if she could.

  "Still, even at the factory, I don't know if–"

  "I know it well. I am sure we can–"

  Across the river, and the air changed, and she smelled Chinatown. They're taking me to the Goblin factory, she thought. "Make me into a goblin," she said, and giggled, though no one seemed to have heard her.

  "It would have been better to let her die."

  "We need her still. She is our tool. She has always been our tool."

  "People are not implements," Colonel Xing said. "We are not – utensils."

  "Then I shall make her into one," Viktor's voice said, complacently.

  The smell of tar. The smell of oil. The smell of machines and hot metal. Flashes in her mind of a phantom fig
ure raising a knife. The smell of burning flesh… a hand on her head and she screamed. A voice: "Quick, give her another shot!"

  Pain, penetrating into her neck. The flashes dissipated like a bad dream. "How do you say, please?" Colonel Xing, the tailend of a conversation.

  "A translation," Viktor's voice said. "Like a saint. Our Lady of Vengeance."

  The hum of machines, the bellows of steam, the air thick with humidity and very hot, and now they were doing something to her leg.

  But she no longer had a leg.

  She couldn't see them. She tried to scream, tell them to stop, but no one heard her.

  "She will be a child of the new age," Viktor's voice said, faint and far away.

  "A monster–" Colonel Xing.

  "We are all monsters," Viktor said cheerfully.

  Then blackness. Then light. Another pain, this one in her arm. She could feel her leg – both her legs. It was a strange sensation. They were doing something to her arm.

  "Not much I can do for the eye…"

  "She would look fetching with a patch."

  "The arm, now, is another matter again–" from Viktor.

  "She will kill you if she could."

  "So would many others. But she will obey the Council."

  "We shall be late to the meeting."

  "I do not trust the lizards."

  "I do not trust the Jianghu. We have no choice."

  "The what?"

  "The Shaolin–Wudang coalition."

  "You have strange customs."

  "As do you."

  "True. Can I trust you?"

  "No."

  "I didn't think so. Ours is a mutual distrust, yet we must work together…"

  "We shall send our own people after him."

  "As will the lizards. As will all the others. Of course. But you have tried before?"

  "Yes…"

  "And failed."

  "Yes…"

  "I heard Krupp is going to the meeting."

  "The weapons man? The German?"

  "Yes, and yes. Next year will be a hunting season…"

  "You take too much delight in your work."

  She felt her arm. The arm she'd lost. She tried to move it.

  "Careful!"

  "It's not loaded."

  The bite of a needle again, and a numbing coolness.

  "You are too fond of the needle, too."

  "Stop telling me my business, colonel."

  "She deserves better."

  "We all do. Now step aside."

  "Finish it."

  "I would if you gave me the opportunity."

  Her arm. What were they doing to her arm? It didn't hurt but the sensation was terrible, unnatural. "Careful, damn it!"

  "She's stronger than I thought!"

  Her arm broke the straps then, hit something – someone – and she heard a scream, and then a dull thud.

  "Hold her still!"

  Hands on her, and she struggled – she could smell their fear and didn't know why. They forced her head back and she kicked–

  "Damn it, do it now!"

  There was a sharp pain like an insect bite in her neck and her whole body went limp. They had given her another shot.

  "Finish it!"

  She tried to speak and couldn't. The world spun away. Then there was only darkness.

  INTERLUDE: Kai Wu Unrolls His Mat

  For a long time after he had arrived in the city the voices were quiet. He had gathered a little of their history. They were weak, their vessel inactive for long periods of time. A human presence revived them, gave them strength, but only for a while. They were, he thought later, when he had learned of Tesla waves, a little like a man turning a dial in the hope of finding a working band. But their attempts were futile. They spoke of transdimensional calibration and quantum effervescence and chronospatial matrices returning negative values but mostly what he felt from them could only be described with a human term, and that was loneliness.

  He knew that feeling well.

  As time passed he became accustomed to the city. It lay in the conjunction of two great rivers, one of which was the Mekong. Above it towered mountains, high forbidding cliffs and thick forests where bears and tigers roamed. The city had many temples and a royal palace and a king, and was a vassal of Siam, but they spoke a different language, which was Lao.

  Also spoken in the city were Chinese; Hmong; Karen; Hakka; there were many dialects and tongues and many different people. There were mountain people and lowlanders, Siamese merchants and Chinese traders, and here and there the people called franag or falang or Europeans. Once he saw something he had thought impossible – a lizard taller than a man, and walking upright, and dressed in clothes. It was dressed like a prince, was escorted by a retinue of farang and Lao. He had thought it one of the Emerald Buddha's illusions, but later found out it was not so, and that such beings did exist, and were very powerful.

  He washed in the river and ate when he could. In the dry season he helped the farmers plant seasonal gardens on the banks, and build bamboo bridges across the river. He carried sacks of rice and flour for the Chinese merchants, interpreted for the Siamese, stole from the Hmong when they had something worth stealing. He learned the city, came to know its tiny stone alleyways, its hiding places and its night places, roaming from beyond the half-island of the rivers' confluence into the lands beyond.

  The statue gave him lightness; he could see in the dark and leap across walls, could spin and kick and duck and run faster than any other child. He could pass unseen even in a crowded place. It was what the wuxia novels had called Qinggong.

  There weren't many books but there was one Chinese merchant who sold fishing nets and tackle and sundry small items from Chung Kuo and he had a small library, and when Kai did small jobs for him he let the boy borrow a book, in lieu of pay. And so he continued to follow the adventures of the Shaolin monks and the Wu Tang Clan and the Beggars' Guild and their enemies, of assassins sent after evil emperors, of lovers fighting impossible odds, of the Wulin and Jianghu and the eternal battle between right and wrong.

  Few noticed him. For a while he had the sensation of being watched, closer than was usual, by a decrepit old beggar whose single eye seemed a little too bright, but when he sought him out the man was gone, and no one could recall seeing him before or after. For a while he worked at the palace, cleaning up the elephants' dung, sweeping floors, watering the flowerbeds, helping the cooks or the gardeners or the monks. He was, in the words of one of the novels, unrolling his mat. He was settling in, making the city his home. For a short time, he was happy.

  As he grew older he began to notice changes in himself. His skin grew thicker, coarser, a metallic grey. One day, scrabbling in the mud, his hand returned and a fingernail had fallen off. Another became loose the next day. He felt the change sweep over him, his old body shedding itself for something new. "What is happening to me?" he asked the statue.

  There was a faint sense of amusement. You asked to be made into a gun, the voices said.

  "I changed my mind," he told them, and had the mental impression of a shrug.

  It is too late to undo what has begun.

  His face, too, acquired a metallic sheen. It did not spread evenly, only affected one side of his face. The fallen nails were replaced with thicker, sharper versions, their colouring metallic, grey, and he felt as if he were a ghost that still, somehow, had substance.

  You could be anything you want, the voices told him. You could be king of all this land.

  "I want my father. He died for you."

  He died for an inaccurate belief, the voices said. It is unfortunate. Your race does not have the – a concept, divorced from words – to comprehend us, make sense of what we are.

  "What are you?"

  A shifting series of wordless concepts, images, and he said, "What do you want of me?"

  We wait, the voices said.

  "For what?"

  A sign. There is another in this world now. A child, but it
is – and then a void, a gap where understanding lay.

  He didn't know what they meant about the child. But he understood being alone.

  Too long… the voices said.

  For months after that he did not speak to the voices. He tried to be human, to eat and to drink and to think like a human. He watched the puppet shows that were popular at that time. He drank rice whisky (he was old enough now) and had his first hangover, though it passed swiftly. He watched the sun set over the river and the mountains. He gambled with the Chinese, and lost, and read the mulberry scrolls in the monastery's library, finding hints of a story about an impossible statue that spoke and drove people mad. For several months he became a monk, and wore the saffron robes, and felt peace.