Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  They didn’t have to confer on the matter. Golding climbed first up the creaking steps, and the other two followed without dissent.

  - Three: Behind the Tapestry -

  Just beyond the top of the stairs, a ratty but still deeply red tapestry embroidered with flowery gold designs hung from the ceiling to block their way.

  “Beautiful,” said Golding, fingering the velvety material. “They had…have?…aesthetic tastes like our own.” His hand found a central divide in the hanging, revealing it to be curtains more so than a tapestry. He parted them with his gun, and slipped through. Immediately, the others heard him exclaim something unintelligible but in unmistakable alarm, and then Kubin was pushing past Morrow to plunge after him, his fingers stumbling awkwardly across his own gun container as he did so. Even Morrow, at the rear, felt at least the impulse to go for her own weapon.

  Beyond the moldering curtains, they immediately discovered what had shocked Golding. Their beams starkly washed across a still figure, standing upright and flat against the wall. At first, Morrow took it to be a mannequin, until she saw the face. Then she took it to be a mummy, even though most of the features were concealed.

  She had never, in all her jumps, seen an animal that was remotely humanoid. Even Golding had never encountered anything more human than, once, a gorilla-like simian with a tapir-like snout, the size of an elephant and no more intelligent than one. This figure, though, despite its desiccation and the mask that obscured the upper part of its face, was plainly human. As human in proportion of limb and torso as herself.

  The mummy would appear to be a male, dressed in a tight black jacket with a ruffled black cravat, black breeches and leggings, a black velvet cape with a silken lining hanging off his shoulders. He wore a black tricorn cap.

  The top half of his face was covered in a mask of white enamel, with a pointed six inch nose. Did the owner’s own nasal appendage extend that far, beneath the mask? The lips of the mummy had drawn back from the yellow grin of teeth, the skin of the chin and sunken lower cheeks being the same hard brown as that resin Morrow had found in the sconce.

  “My God,” Golding whispered. “A man. A man…”

  “How could evolution run this parallel?” Kubin breathed. He holstered his weapon, stepped forward to finger a button of the mummy’s jacket. “I wonder if our gear is finding conditions here to be able to support human life. If we could ever find a way to actually get people here…in ships…in a safer mode of jumping…”

  “We don’t know if this planet is in any better shape than our own,”

  Morrow told him, half-consciously wanting to be contrary, as he had been with her. Not that she didn’t share his desires. The Earth might not survive the search for its replacement, like a man in desperate need of a heart transplant waiting too long for a matching donor.

  Kubin lifted the mask a little to peek beneath. Behind its eye holes, there were only two empty black sockets. Behind the phallic Pinocchio nose, only a depressed nasal hollow. There was the white husk of a four legged spider in the nose cavity, a mummy within the mummy.

  The head rotated slightly, like that of a doll, so that the skull sockets pointed directly at his face. The movement caused a little dust to sprinkle down off the three-cornered hat.

  Stepping back with a strangled cry, Kubin let the porcelain mask drop back in place over the mummy’s features. And as he had taken a step back, so did the cadaver take one stiff, awkward step forward.

  “Jesus Christ!” Golding blurted. He instinctively raised his pistol to point at the thing’s face, as if he had a flesh and blood body to protect. Still, Golding had once seen a colleague buried in an avalanche of snow, and the sudden destruction of his suit—the jarring disconnection of his consciousness, attenuated across that gulf in space—had so shocked his physical body that its heart had jolted to a stop. Only with quick effort was he rescued from the brink of oblivion.

  One of the reanimated corpse’s black-gloved hands groped at the handle of a thin sword scabbarded at its waist. It began to draw the blade, which still shone brightly however many years the mummy had lingered in its undead state.

  Kubin went for his gun again at the sight of the bared metal, but Golding already had his finger on the trigger. Their audio pickups heard the gun’s three crisp cracks. The first projectile struck the approaching cadaver, a tangible golem of leathery flesh and gummed blood, in the upper chest. The second shot, a bit higher due to the gun’s slight recoil, drove the bullet through the thing’s scrawny neck. A trickle of black, tar-like ichor ran out, and flecked the wall behind. The third shot struck the cheek of the porcelain mask, shattering it so that a few chunks fell away.

  The projectiles halted the thing’s advance. It drew no more inches of its half-sheathed rapier. The thing wavered there subtly, as if it had decided to return to its suspended animation. And then, like a scarecrow, it crumpled…into a brittle heap at their feet.

  “Dear God,” Golding stammered.

  “We came all this way, and finally found a human…and we killed it,”

  Morrow said, her heart seeming to race, even though it was not inside the suit with her mind. She knew that back home, her cardio-monitor would be beeping at an accelerated rate.

  “I don’t know how, but it was already dead,” Kubin said. “At least, for the most part.”

  “Look!” Golding shouted, whirling to point his gun further down the narrow, upper passageway.

  Across the wooden floor of the upper level, which creaked under their weight but seemed to be made from one impossibly large piece of wood, two dark figures were slowly advancing on them, shuffling as if they had no joints in their limbs. Golding’s search light flashed on the exposed metal of a blade…then they heard a second blade rasp out of its scabbard.

  “We should get outside,” Morrow cried, “until we can assess the situation!”

  “Shit!” Kubin exclaimed, spinning around to see another of the animated corpses pushing through the curtains of gold-embroidered velvet. This one had ascended the stairs behind them, unheard in all the furor. It too wore black garments and cape, tricorn hat, though the mask’s nose was a hooked eagle’s beak. The eye holes of the mask were utterly black and empty. In one hand, and being raised with ominous slowness, was a flintlock pistol.

  “They’re surrounding us!” Golding blurted, and as the two farther figures began to shamble into his light, he opened fire on them, squeezing off shot after shot, almost blindly.

  Behind him, Kubin fired his own ceramic-bodied pistol at the cadaver that was emerging through the tapestry…before it could fire its own. One bullet vanished into one of the mask’s eye holes. Lurching back without uttering a sound of pain or surprise, its grinning teeth not even parting, the corpse seized the hanging and tore it down as it fell. It tumbled backward down the steps, its gun clattering away.

  By the time Kubin swung around again to help Golding fire at the two distant figures, it was too late. He saw one had already collapsed, and the second one was toppling.

  After the flurry of gunfire had ceased and its echoes had swum away, the hallway-like structure rang silent. No more of the reanimated bodies were approaching from either direction. Keeping his gun at the ready, however, and leading the way with it, Golding moved toward the two distant ones he had just dropped.

  As the trio advanced on the scarecrow bodies, their lights illuminated a bizarre spectacle just beyond the broken husks. At first, this impelled them on more quickly, shocked with a curiosity beyond the scientific. But as they drew close to the spectacle, they halted and held off at a slight distance, finally aghast at what they had discovered…unable and a little unwilling to take it in.

  The narrow structure was blocked, ahead of them, by a barrier of pale green glass, which extended from wall to wall, from floor to a lower section of ceiling. Behind this glass partition, the hallway’s walls were no longer stripped and worn, veiled in cobwebs; instead, were covered in silvery satin wallpaper. A painting of a fo
rest scene hung in a gilded frame. In another, a seascape of that gelatinous green ocean, even featuring three of those mysterious domed creatures. There was a fireplace along one wall, apparently with a pot of that flammable resin in it, with flowers in vases on the mantel. There were chairs and a few divans upholstered in silver satin, and red rugs embroidered in gold thread spaced along the varnished honey of the floor. Small tables held tea cups, wine glasses, and was that a cake of cheese on a platter?

  And there were people, as well, preserved as if in greenish formaldehyde in a frozen tableau.

  Men, dressed like the soldiers they had killed, except that not all wore black; there were some in white, with white capes and caps, others in metallic gold, or royal blue, or crimson. But all wore ceramic masks. And there were females, as well. Women of earthly form, with tight bodices clinging to their constricted waists, low necklines exposing bunched cleavage. Throats and chests of an alabaster whiteness. Voluminous hooped skirts of silver or gold satin, emerald or raven black. The women wore the ceramic masks as well, though instead of elongated or hooked noses theirs had daintier, up-turned noses, and some feminine masks had flairs like wings at their edges. All the women wore tall, powdered wigs. From their queues, white pigtails tied with black ribbons, apparently the men wore powdered wigs under their tricorn hats, as well.

  There had been a party, caught in amber. Fossilized in time.

  The men and women stood in knots of conversation. Some held glasses of wine, and one seated man held the hand of a seated woman. A young woman was whispering into a stouter, older woman’s ear. There were couples locked in the swirl of dance, and musicians who had been stopped in mid note. Kubin could not estimate the number of bodies, because the sumptuous hallway dwindled into the far distance, and all along its length were these revelers, as far as he could see.

  But Golding’s bullets had struck the glass, after passing through or missing the undead soldiers—or guards, as Kubin sensed they had been. And as streams of a faintly greenish fluid, the color of absinthe, trickled from the bullet holes shattered in the webbed glass, the three explorers realized that the room beyond was filled to its lower ceiling with liquid. A preserving, miniature sea, lighter than the one outside, and not as viscous—but a diluted version, perhaps. Slowly, the level of fluid began to inch down away from the ceiling, as it streamed down the glass wall, pooled along the floor of the upper gallery, and gushed down the wooden steps behind them.

  Four: The Eternal Fete -

  Strangely, the level of fluid inside the flooded hallway ahead of the explorers appeared to be lowering more quickly than seemed possible, given the amount that sluiced out of the bullet holes and ran around their feet. After all, the flooded hallway ran back as far as the eye sensor could see.

  Morrow suggested, under her breath, though her golem here had no breath, that the fluid was evaporating as much as it was running free of its tank. By the time the level reached the necks of the frozen presences, this became most apparent…for the tall powdered wigs of the women were not sodden, did not topple under their own saturated weight, just as they had not unraveled into nests of seaweed when they had been submerged entirely. As soon as the fluid had receded, that which it had touched was already dry in its wake. The flowers in vases did not hang crushed by the many gallons of the greenish amniotic fluid, their stems retaining their delicate resilience. Nothing that had been uncovered dripped or glistened with moisture.

  The fluid was down to the waists of those trapped behind the glass wall (or were the three jumpers trapped out here?), when the first of them—a woman—turned her head in their direction, as rustily as had that first soldier.

  But the skin of these entombed was not dehydrated leather. The soft lips of the woman’s lovely mouth still covered her teeth. Her flesh was smooth, immac-ulate, as if the revelers had all been outwardly embalmed by the flood.

  More heads turned their way. Arms long held out in invitation to dance, or in the caress of a bloodlessly white cheek, now lowered and shifted somnam-bulantly. The dreamers were awakening.

  “Maybe we should get outside,” Kubin said, echoing Morrow’s earlier sentiment, “until we can assess the situation…”

  “What?” Golding laughed in his amazement, in his exhilaration. “We have to communicate with them! We didn’t come all this way to run away like children…and we can’t be harmed by them, you know.” He neglected to bring up the matter of his partner who had nearly been killed by an avalanche…or the fact that he had been the first to use his weapon here. The weapon he wasn’t returning to its compartment.

  “They won’t be happy that we killed the others…”

  “The others were already dead. If they hadn’t been, they’d have kept them inside where they are.”

  “Unless,” Kubin said, “they left those others outside to watch over them.”

  “Or even,” said Morrow, “to be the ones to flood the chamber, to keep these party-goers in stasis.”

  “We’ll soon find out, but we have to keep our heads,” Golding told his companions.

  The level of the fluid was below the lowest of the bullet holes in the glass.

  Fluid no longer ran out the punctures, but still the flood was receding in the immense aquarium. And now, the figures within were moving more freely.

  First one, then another, began to wade stiffly through the thigh-high pool…move toward the wall of glass. In only a few seconds, it seemed all of them intended the same…

  As one, the jumpers stepped back further from the glass wall.

  The first to reach the glass was the woman who had first turned her head.

  She was smiling now, her red lips stretched back from white teeth that somehow seemed to leer just as eerily as those of the living mummies. She was mouthing words they couldn’t hear, or on a frequency their sensors were not sensitive to. Her hands slapped suction-like against the glass, her fingers spread wide. Others came up behind her, pressing her forward, squashing her bosom flat against the barrier. More hands pressed against the barrier. More mouths working, more hungry grins.

  The webs around the bullet holes were spreading. The trio heard the cracking sound.

  Now all three of the explorers, even Morrow, had their pistols in hand.

  “It’s giving way,” she hissed.

  They could see eyes glittering in the shadows of the masks’ holes, where there had only been a void in those of the less perfectly preserved soldiers.

  One of the palms was pressed directly against one of the bullet holes.

  Then, with a shatter, the hand was through, and chunks of thick glass dropped to the wooden floor, which was moldering gray out here, lacquered glossy in there. The skin of the hand had been slashed in several places, and blood flowed from the lacerations. Red blood, not the black sludge of the soldiers.

  But not only was blood released. Voices could now be heard through the hole…still muffled by the dense glass, but unmistakable. There was a chorus of moaning, not of melancholy but of yearning. An almost erotic ocean of sound. Mixed into this was the groaning of pain from those squashed directly against the glass, such as the man whose hand grasped convulsively at the explorers in the air, dribbling blood to the floor. Such as that first woman, who was no longer grinning carnally but grinding her teeth in agony.

  “They’re insane,” Kubin muttered. And it was indeed as if a tea party of the mad had been entombed in a liquid asylum. “We have to go…”

  “Hold your ground!” Golding shouted, himself grinning, his own eyes mad. “We can’t be killed!”

  “Our suits can be ruined…our mission can fail,” Morrow stammered.

  “This mission is anything but a failure!”

  Another of the bullet holes was enlarged, more glass fell. A man’s head pushed out through this new hole, his hat falling away to reveal the white wig beneath. If his agonized mouth was spewing words, they were lost in the increasing clamor of voices. His neck, slashed by the edge of the glass, ran with brilliant
gore, streaking down the glass as the amniotic fluid had done.

  And now the explorers realized that all of that fluid had vanished from the room behind the glass barrier.

  Then, the barrier could take no more. With one abrupt crash, it split like a chunk of arctic ice plowed up by a ship, fell away. The crush of bodies piled forward in an avalanche of flesh. Some were buried beneath, their hands scrabbling as if for fistfuls of air to breath. Those atop them crawled over them, and others over them in turn. Women’s wigs now, finally, tilted or fell entirely away from the dark hair pinned beneath. But as yet, no masks had fallen. The serenity of their upper faces contrasted horribly with the hunger or pain in the lower portions of their pallid visages.

  The explorers backed further and further away. But already, some of the revelers were regaining their feet. And then, they were running at the explorers.

  Arms outstretched, fingers like claws, mouths open so terribly wide.

  “Run!” Kubin shouted at Morrow, and the two of them whirled in the opposite direction.

  And there, shambling toward them, were a half dozen of the desiccated soldiers in black. Some with cup-handled swords drawn. Several with flintlock pistols. Kubin managed to get off several shots—smashing the lower jaw off one soldier—before a double-edged sword with a long slender blade crashed down on his wrist with such unexpected force that the delicate hand was partly severed from the servo-driven suit. His gun skittered across the floor.

  Morrow shot a soldier in the center of its enameled forehead. The mask split down the middle and fell away, shards of it lodged in the guard’s skull.