Drooling black blood, which her sensors told her reeked of decay, the cadaver sank to be replaced by another. And then a flintlock thundered. The air was filled with bluish smoke. She felt the impact in her chest, and she staggered back…back into the arms of the revelers. Twisting her head in a panic, she saw that Golding had already been engulfed. He, too, was finally firing his gun…but his hand, then his entire arm, was wrenched out of him by the sheer numbers and ferocity of the party-goers.
Kubin was down on the floor, and buried. Faces and hands pressed against his helmet as they had pressed against the glass wall, lips mashed as if to kiss him, rings and teeth grating along the surface.
He realized that hands were tearing at the tubes on his suit. Slipping inside his suit. Dismantling his gear, in their frenzy. He realized that in trying to unclasp and unscrew what they took to be a mere helmet, they were in fact removing his head-piece from the rest of his walking vehicle.
A woman and man stood up in sudden horror, holding the head of Kubin’s suit between them. Out of the helmet, Kubin stared at them, still blinking, before the last artificial tendons snapped free of his neck stump, and the hologram blinked out of existence.
Five: The Resurrected -
The three bodies lay naked in a line on a long dining table, as if prepared for a feast.
Revelers, their wigs and dignity restored, either sat at the table staring at the pale cadavers while sipping wine, or milled about in subdued conversation. They were waiting.
One of the cadavers, a middle aged man, had a bullet hole in his upper chest where Golding had hit him with a wild bullet. The wound had been cleansed. It was already dilating smaller. Already healing.
Another, younger man was the one whose throat had been slashed on the barrier’s broken glass. But this yawning gash was already sealing…and he was beginning to flutter open his eyes.
The beautiful masked woman who had first turned her head, first reached the glass had been killed in the crush of bodies, her neck broken. But she sat up stiffly atop the dining table, and again turned her head rustily to take in her surroundings.
Morrow glanced down at her new, naked body, and mewled, “Oh my God!” in a voice, in a language, that was not her own.
All at once, the revelers at the tables and milling about burst into applause.
Kubin was swinging his legs over the side of the table and trying to get to his feet. He stumbled, but two revelers took his elbows to help him stand. Atop the table, Golding had sat up in his new flesh and gingerly touched the puck-ered hole in his breast.
The trio were the only people in the room not to have clothing, or wigs…but new masks had already been affixed to their faces. Kubin’s had one of those elongated noses, Golding’s one of those falcon beaks. Morrow’s was delicate and lovely in its shape, framing lustrous brown eyes where her own eyes had once been a faded blue.
“I’m Morrow,” she said effortlessly in that alien tongue, turning to face Kubin. “Are you Gee or Kay?”
“It’s Kubin,” he told her. Kubin looked to the other man as he slid off the table unsteadily to his feet. “Gee?”
“It’s Golding,” this stranger confirmed.
The applause had died away, but smiles beamed on most of the faces of the revelers.
“How are we in these bodies?” Kubin asked, his lower jaw trembling so violently that his teeth came close to chattering. He ran his hands over his chest. His hands could feel his chest, his chest could feel his hands.
“They’re three who died when they surrounded us,” Golding said, pointing to his bullet wound. “We’ve…occupied their bodies. Like we animated the suits…”
“But how? ” Morrow blurted, involuntarily grasping Golding’s forearm.
They both felt the contact as if these were the bodies they had been born with…
From the opposing walls of the hallway, several of the smartly attired and hideous-visaged soldiers took a few steps forward…in case there was trouble.
They carried lances that looked both ceremonial and wicked.
“It is ironic,” said a new voice. “But it is fitting, I suppose.” One of the revelers, a man in purple crushed velvet embroidered with gold trim, his tricorn hat in matching hues, rose from one of the chairs at the table seemingly as long as a highway. “It is Destiny, one might think.”
“What’s happened to us?” Kubin demanded, backing away from the man.
He stood protectively beside this new woman who was Morrow, her hair falling in long dark tendrils down her back, where Morrow’s had been short and graying.
The man in purple spread his gloved hands. His lips looked rouged, his white flesh powdered, and he had a black beauty dot pasted at one corner of his mouth. “We sought to inhabit you. To find new bodies in you. We did not realize that your bodies were artificial.” He smiled with a look of embarrassed apology. “We sought to will ourselves into your bodies. Instead, you willed yourselves into the bodies of our dead. Apparently, without intention.”
“But how could we do that?”
“As we would have done. But this is our punishment, I suppose, for being so greedy. To be denied new flesh.”
“How could we will ourselves into these bodies?” Kubin persisted. “Make them come back to life, and heal? We don’t have those skills.”
“Over time, it has become the nature of our bodies. Even though they had expired, those bodies you now inhabit no doubt drew you into themselves as much as you were drawn, unconsciously, to them. We knew this had transpired when we tasted your essences in flight.”
“Why would you want to steal our bodies?” Golding asked, moving closer to the man.
“This is why,” answered another man dressed in a rich brown velvet. He partly lowered the mask from his face. Beneath it, his eyes were filmed a milky white, and an ugly lesion showed at the edge of his wig’s hairline.
“Without being preserved in our bath,” a woman sighed, smiling sadly,
“we will erode very quickly.”
“Yes,” boomed another man, dressed in black as the sentries were, pushing himself forward between the others. He was not smiling, and he thrust a finger at Golding. “You released us prematurely. You are invaders here.
Don’t you see that you’ve doomed us all?”
“Where is it that you come from?” asked another woman.
“What world is it?” asked an elderly, daintily dressed man.
The angry man persisted. “You’ve slaughtered us all…condemned us to rot, like them.” He gestured to one of the guards. “Worse than them. We’ll soon all fall apart…”
“Can’t you…can’t you pump in that fluid again?” Morrow asked.
“Replace the broken wall?”
“We are investigating that possibility,” the man in purple assured her, laying a hand gently on the black-garbed man’s arm. “We have sent men to look at the pumps that bring in the water from the sea.”
“They’ll be rusted. Ruined,” snarled the angry man. “Have you looked about you, Citrin? We have been asleep for centuries! ”
“Do not give up hope, dear Captain. And if it is indeed fated that we perish, then that is the will of the Pod.”
“It is not my will!” the black-garbed man shouted, jerking away from Citrin, and storming off down the beautiful hallway.
“Come.” Citrin extended a hand to Morrow. “We will clothe you, accom-modate you…then you can tell us about your world. Perhaps you can even help us…”
“How can you treat these invaders as guests?” protested a woman in a scarlet gown. “They killed Tondriau!” She pointed at Golding’s stout body.
“And brought about the death of the other two!”
“We brought about their deaths, in our frenzy,” another woman countered.
“Our cruder natures overwhelmed us. Now we are fully ourselves, fully composed again. We should lay the fault for these deaths at our own feet.”
“It is an act of the Pod,” said a man all in v
iolet. “These people did not intend to harm us. Did you, my friends?”
The trio of jumpers could not form an answer, dazed as they took in this debate.
“It is Fate, the will of the Pod, that we rot and die,” a woman all in satiny pink sighed wistfully. “Frankly, I grow weary of being alive.”
- Six: Reflections -
“You realize that we’ll never get home, now,” Kubin said to Morrow, watching as she lightly touched the edges of her high, piled wig in the mirror.
“Even if we can repair our suits, how do we will our consciousness back into them? And what about our minds, back home? Have they stopped? Are they still projecting themselves here…but into these biological machines, instead?”
Unconsciously, his eyes trailed down her back, where it was exposed by the low edge of her satiny white bodice. He recalled now how in the dining hall a dark patch of hair had shown below the pale smoothness of her belly…but he had not as yet seen the face behind her mask.
In the mirror, Morrow saw his eyes dip down then back up again. She turned to face him. Her full lips, which had been freshly rouged for her by the servants who had dressed her, smiled faintly. “It’s only fair, I suppose, after what we’ve done to them.”
“You’re as fatalistic as they are.”
“They’re right. Unless they can pump in that sea water, or whatever it is, again…they’ll all decompose while they’re still alive. Become like those zombies, at best.”
“Why?”
“It’s their environment. One of the servants told me. It was poisoned—polluted, it sounds like—over time. Whole cities died. Cities like this building we’re in. But these people had money. They could afford to protect themselves…until a better day could come.”
“And the zombies, those guards, were supposed to release them if it ever did.”“Yes. But that time never came. This world is still poisoned. And now their decay is finally catching up with them.”
Kubin turned to glance around this tiny, compartmentalized room within the vaster room that was the wall-building. It was like a beautifully decorated cell, one of many stacked in a honeycomb, accessed by ladders or staircases, on the level above the immense ballroom that had been flooded.
Without being preserved by the sea, the wallpaper here was stained and sagging, cobwebs had had to be swept away, but it was still better preserved than the portion of the great structure they had initially entered. A small window looked out beyond the wall-city, away from the sea, toward bare-looking hills hunkered dark in the perpetual gray twilight, like dead whales heaped up on a beach.
“So they decided to throw a big farewell party, huh?” Kubin said. “While they let in the sea?”
“It looks like it.”
“Have you seen any children?”
Morrow looked at him, fingering a black velvet ribbon around her slender pale throat. “No. I guess none lived in this building. Or weren’t invited to the party.”
“I wish I had a better sense of these people’s morality,” Kubin muttered, now looking in the mirror himself, at his own masked face. Oddly, he was reluctant to remove the mask in front of Morrow. It seemed like an improper thing to do. Was there some vestige of this body’s former inhabitant still lingering like cobwebs in the corners of its skull? How else could he understand and speak the native tongue?
“I’d say it varies per individual. As it does in our own people.”
“I just want to be sure we’re safe. Now that we have flesh and blood bodies here.” Kubin faced her, tapping the subtle pink line which was all that remained of the wound there. “I don’t want this body to die a second time.”
“But it will,” Morrow said, smiling faintly again. “It’s already dying.”
With that, she removed her mask. The heart-shaped face beneath was striking in its beauty. The eyes were large and dark, commanding, accented by thick arched brows. The mouth small but moistly full. Kubin was ashamed, oddly—as if she had exposed her dainty breasts to him, as they had been exposed in the banquet hall.
Despite Morrow’s stolen youthful beauty, there was a yellow and purple bruise on her cheek near one ear. She fingered the tender patch.
“We’re going to rot, too, Kay,” she told him. Fatalistically.
He took an involuntary step toward her, as if to touch her cheek as well.
“But…how can this happen to us? How come we could repair these ruined dead bodies, only to start rotting?”
“I don’t pretend to understand their physiology, Kay. When we initially entered the bodies, I suppose our life force or however you might categorize it…our souls if you want…”
“I don’t want,” he interrupted.
“Well, whatever it was, it fed and repaired the bodies. But now that we’re settled into them…I think they’re going to break down. Just like the bodies of all the other citizens. Apparently not at the same rate. But it seems inevitable.”
“We have to try to help them get that pump working again,” he muttered.
“Do you suggest we entomb ourselves with them?”
“If that’s what we have to do. Until help can arrive some day.
Others…who might be better equipped to handle this situation than we are.”
“Let’s find Gee, then. And look at those pumps.”
Nodding grimly, Kubin went to hold the door to her tiny assigned apartment open for her. It had been the room of the woman who had been crushed.
Lilin, her name had been. Dark hairs from her head, faded through time, were still snagged in a brush on her miniature vanity.
Her wide snowy skirts rustling, Morrow swept past him out the narrow door. In her wake, Kubin found himself deeply inhaling the perfumes and powders the servants had spread across her glowing white flesh.
- Seven: The Underworld -
Citrin, who was the leader of these people—the “Master of the Manor”, as he described himself—led them himself to the pump.
“The pump filters out the ocean’s impurities,” he explained along the way,
“letting in only its purified essence. I have sent parties of servants out gathering sea water in buckets, so that they can filter out the impurities on a smaller scale…that we might drink this elixir and stave off our decomposition as long as we may.”
They had ventured into a more decayed section of the manor, again with an impossibly high ceiling and with carbonized sand drifted in dunes across the cobblestones, having blown in through broken windows whose shutters had fallen with time. Ultimately, carrying a lantern containing some of that burning resin, he led them to a metal door. It squealed painfully on rusted hinges. Beyond its black threshold, equally corroded metal steps led down into a deep subterranean level. The trio of explorers followed him, their shoes ringing on the steps, which they ardently hoped would not crumble to rust beneath them.
Kubin and Golding carried lanterns as well, the former now dressed entirely in white, the latter in a handsome deep blue.
“We must be on our guard,” said Citrin, who gripped a heavy flintlock in his left hand. “The local fauna, much deformed by poisons and by time, has found its way into these lower regions, I’ve been informed.”
The newcomers had not yet, themselves, been trusted with firearms or swords. The guns from their dismantled suits had been confiscated.
“These are not our original bodies, you know,” Citrin told them, as they descended the last of the stairs to the basement level. Its walls were just as narrow as those above, though they were composed of mortared brick, shrouded in sooty web festooned with spider carcasses. Because they had descended so far, the ceiling was again lost in darkness high above. It was damp, and their voices echoed hollowly. “Our own scientists brought these bodies here from some other place, perhaps from your own place, many many years ago. But their arcane knowledge is lost to time, I fear.”
“What were your former bodies like?”
“I don’t know. None of us know. We obliterated the memory of our former bod
ies, so as to identify with our new forms. To think of them as our own. We don’t even recall what these earlier forms called themselves. We call ourselves the Masque.”
“Why abandon the earlier bodies?” asked Golding.
“Because they were rotting, just as these bodies are rotting. It is inescapable, so it would seem. Our Destiny, one would say.”
“Well, why not delay Destiny if we can?” said Kubin. “Where is that pump?”
“This way.” Citrin led them again, his lamp held at the length of his arm.
They had only taken a dozen steps when Golding halted and whispered,
“What’s that?”
There was a dry, wispy chittering sound from the shadowy void above them, soaring indefinitely in the limited glow of their guttering lanterns.
Like a huge albino spider, or lizard, or something in between, a bleached skeletal form scuttled head-first down the wall, into the wavering lantern glow. It stopped abruptly, its bony fingers and toes gripping the bricks, and lifted its face to them—hissing. The nude, emaciated body was like that of a starved child, the oversized head hairless and skull-like. The creature’s eyes were huge and entirely pink, but covered in a translucent membrane. Its teeth, set in lipless gums, were combs of needles.
It bunched its scrawny muscles, in what looked like the prelude to a leap.
Citrin raised his pistol and fired its single, heavy ball. The enclosing walls roared with the discharge, stabbing the party’s ears. For a moment, they couldn’t see the creature through the cloud of smoke, but as it dispersed, they saw the creature lying on its back on the flagstoned floor…jerking in dying convulsions, a sap-thick white fluid oozing out of one punctured and collapsed eye.
“Was that one of the local fauna?” Morrow gasped.
“In a way. It was one of our people…a descendant of one of our people.
One of those who did not escape the poisons, but still managed to survive and adapt. In a corrupted form.”
“God,” Kubin breathed, staring down at the finally still, ghastly being. It was oddly pathetic, despite its obvious savage intent.
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