Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “More or less the living dead, like our poor devoted guards,” Citrin said, as he loaded a new ball into his flintlock.

  They continued on past the corpse, which had curled up upon itself like one of the countless spider husks.

  There were thick pipes that now ran along the walls, caked in rust and patched here and there with rags or bolted plates. “We’re close,” said Citrin, removing his hat to brush away some webs he had accumulated. “This equipment was built in part with a few last dregs of knowledge remaining from our lost science.”

  Morrow pointed to three large circles etched into the wall, arranged in a kind of pyramid. “What is this?”

  “The symbol of our deity. The Pod.” Citrin replaced his hat. “Onward, my friends.”

  Ahead, they heard echoy voices and saw faint lights tremble across the walls of the brick canyon. One might have thought it was ghosts, but it turned out to be a small team of men with rolled up sleeves, covered in grease, but with their masks still hiding their faces. They were working on the pumps, sweating and swearing in their effort.

  “How goes it, men?” Citrin inquired in an encouraging, cheerful tone.

  “Poorly,” said the team leader, approaching them. Did his eyes flick rue-fully at the newcomers? “Too corroded. We can’t replace the parts we need.

  The iron forgers from the factory-city will all be long dead by now.”

  “We must try to substitute parts, then, or make due with fewer parts—cut corners,” Citrin said. “We must improvise.”

  “We are trying just that, my lord. But I am not at all optimistic.”

  “Can we have a look?” asked Golding.

  “By all means,” the foreman said, with a sarcastically exaggerated sweep of his arm.

  Advancing with his lantern, Golding murmured to Kubin and Morrow,

  “Primitive. Impressive, but primitive.”

  “Do you think we can do something, then?” Morrow asked.

  He stopped to face her, smiling ironically. “I didn’t say that.”

  While the new citizens lay their new hands on the rusted gears, tanks, nests of pipes that composed the heart of this circulatory system, its ovens cool and its bellows silent, another team of men emerged from deeper down the tunnel. Several had shirts stained with gore. They carried casks of wine, jars of pickled fruits or vegetable. The team leader reported to Citrin, “We lost two men to some terrible debased beings. These creatures have been sub-sisting on our provisions, as well.”

  “Damn them, poor blighted beasts,” Citrin muttered, wagging his head.

  “We’ll starve before we rot,” grumbled the repair team’s foreman. “All because of these blundering fools, who awakened us before our time.”

  “Help was never going to come for you!” Kubin snapped. “Who do you think was going to clean up this world, or invent a way for you to survive in it? Those mutations?”

  Golding turned to Citrin with a bitter smile. “I don’t think there’s much we can do for you here, sir.” He clapped the rust from his palms. “Your man is right. This pump is a ruin.”

  Morrow stepped forward. “You don’t think there’s anything salvageable from our suits we could adapt? The circulatory plumbing? The motors?”

  “Not to integrate into this mess. Not to pump that volume of water.”

  Golding shook his head. “They’d best continue to filter and drink the water in small quantities. Maybe we can use our plumbing to help them with that. It’s the best we can do.”

  “It won’t be enough,” said the repair team’s foreman. “I’ll watch you bas-tards rot along with me.”

  “Enough,” Citrin commanded. He took Golding’s elbow. “We might as well return. In the end, the Pod will decide what is best.”

  - Eight: Entropy -

  In the kitchen area, where the servants prepared meals for the rest of the manor-city’s inhabitants, Golding, Morrow and Kubin had designated an area in which to create a new filtering system that might screen the pollution from water brought in manually from outside. They were combining parts from all three of their disabled suits, and a few of the best repairmen in the building were also lending their aid…though the team leader with whom Kubin had clashed refused to participate, saying that the strangers could not know how much of the sea water’s properties to filter out, and how much of its preservative powers to leave intact. But those repairmen who did consent to help in the project, whose input on the degree and manner of filtration was invaluable, seemed to think the strangers were doing an admirable job. Still, even they were of the opinion that the inevitable could not be held long at bay…

  One morning (though the sky outside never deviated from its slate gray gloom), Kubin was walking alone toward the kitchen compartments to join his partners when he heard a rustling sound advancing very quickly behind him.

  He turned somewhat defensively, and found himself looking down at a woman whose upper lip had turned black, dried out to a leathery twist, and curled up to expose her front teeth. The point of her chin, likewise, had blackened and looked gangrenous. Her breath, when she spoke, was septic…but her eyes shone intently.

  “Venefice,” she said intensely.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you not know me, Venefice?” She seized onto his arm in both hands.

  She had on white gloves up to her elbows, and a red stain was soaking through the wrist of one of them. “I know how I must look to you…but do you not recognize your wife?”

  “Madam…I’m sorry…I…”

  “Venefice!” Within her mask, he saw her eyes shimmer with tears. “I heard you were dead…I heard you were dead, my love! But here you are!

  Here you are!”

  The woman buried her rotting face against his chest, quaking with sobs, Kubin’s hands hovering ineffectually above her back.

  Two servant women, also on their way to the kitchen, realized the situation and quickened their pace, helped pry the sobbing woman off of him. One of the servants whispered to Kubin, “I know her, sir. Your body…it was the body of her husband.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kubin said to her, inadequately. Guiltily.

  He watched as the pair of servants, on either side of the woman, walked her back down the hallway. The woman wrenched her neck around at a mad angle and screamed once more the name that Kubin didn’t know, but which nonetheless sounded uneasily familiar to him.

  Kubin thought of his own wife then. Fancifully, he pictured her clinging with both hands to the arm of his corpse-like naked body, shaking him, calling his name…but unable to see his face beneath the mask of equipment that covered it.

  In the kitchen now, he crouched down beside Morrow, who was already at work threading tubing from one of their suits into the filtering system. She had a stick of writing charcoal tucked into her wig, which made him smile. He asked her softly, “How is that mark on your cheek?”

  Facing him, she hesitated a moment, then raised her mask up enough for him to peek. One of the repairmen, embarrassed by this intimate display, looked away sharply. Another looked on avidly. The bruise had darkened, spread a little, but was not much worse. Remembering the woman who had accosted him, Kubin was relieved.

  “I would have thought Golding would be here already,” Kubin said.

  “He was here a few minutes, but he told me he wasn’t feeling well. He returned to his room for some more sleep.”

  Kubin nodded. His alien body wasn’t feeling well rested itself. “We’re all under a lot of stress.”

  What they judged to be several hours later (both of them still unable to interpret the complicated time pieces of the Masque people, which had three faces arranged in a triangle—the symbol of their deity), Morrow and Kubin decided to take a break and walk, each with a dry and crumbling chunk of cheese in hand. They found themselves climbing several staircases, up into higher levels within the seemingly infinite wall-city, where most of the dwelling compartments appeared to be clustered. The corridor they traveled down was lin
ed with ladders and very narrow staircases leading up to a series of these apartments, above their heads. The relatively low ceiling of this section was comforting to them, compared to the abyss that loomed in other areas.

  Kubin had begun to tell Morrow about the woman who had recognized him—even in his mask — as her husband, when his words were cut short by a woman’s scream, ahead of them. For a moment, because of their conversation, he thought it might be his body’s former mate, having once again sought him out. But Morrow darted forward, her unwieldy skirts swishing, and then he too realized that the cry had been one of pain and fear.

  A second cry caused Morrow to scramble to a stop beneath one of the ladders lining the hall. She hauled herself up it, and pushed at the wooden hatch above her. It was unlocked, and slammed open. She continued her ascent, with Kubin clambering up after her.

  It was the apartment of a young woman, with a single narrow bed to indicate her unmarried status. Nevertheless, a man was hunched over her, one hand clamping itself over her mouth, the other pressed flat against her chest to pin her to the bed.

  Morrow swept up a cut glass perfume bottle from the woman’s vanity, raised it over her shoulder. The man’s head turned to look back at her with something like an animal’s snarl, and for several shocked beats she hesitated.

  Due to his disfigurement, the man’s age was difficult to judge. He had lost his hat whilst overpowering the woman, and his wig was askew. Her nails had raked down a forehead all purple and black, plowing deep grooves there which wept a greenish pus. One of the man’s eyes was a milky cataract, the other a vacant skull socket. His nose had been eaten into a crater. A bloated bluish tongue had swollen so much that it had forced his jaws apart.

  Then, with a cry herself, Morrow brought the heavy perfume bottle down on the man’s skull. The stopper flew off, and Kubin’s jacket was sprinkled with a flowery fragrance that did not mask the odor of decomposition. The man slumped upon the woman with a phlegmy grunt. Kubin rushed past Morrow to roll the man off his victim, while Morrow helped the sobbing young woman to her feet. When the groaning man tried to rise from the bed, Kubin stomped his boot on his rear.

  “Who is he? Was he trying to rape you?” Morrow asked the woman, her arm around her protectively.

  “Rape me? No.” The woman sneered at the man, trembling violently.

  “Look at him. He hasn’t long to go. Some go faster than others. He was trying to steal my body. He was trying to crowd me out, so he could have my body instead.”

  “Christ,” Kubin breathed, looking down again at the moaning, ruined figure.

  “You must be careful,” the woman said, regaining her composure, and recognizing them as the newcomers. “There will be more of this. Where your bodies are newly occupied, newly resurrected, I think you will last longer than most. Though I can not promise you. But others might try to steal your bodies, as desperation grows. As more people find themselves less understanding for your having released us from sleep.” With the back of her hand, the woman wiped her mouth, making an expression of disgust. She could no doubt taste her attacker’s decay on her lips. “Please, will you come with me? Will you take this man, with me, to Captain Breton? And tell him what you witnessed?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Morrow…though both she and Kubin disliked the Captain. He was the man garbed in black who had been so hostile toward them upon the resurrection of these unintentionally commandeered bodies.

  Morrow and Kubin managed to support the slumped, still groaning man between them, but they did not relish the stench of him…or their nearness to him, given what he had attempted with the young woman. Kubin even found himself glancing at Morrow several times, to make sure he still recognized her there in her new eyes.

  At last, they found Breton in the dining hall where they had been reborn.

  There appeared to be a meeting in progress, with all others seated but the Captain himself. Today he had a rapier on his hip. He was also dabbing a raw lesion on the side of his neck with an embroidered handkerchief.

  By the time they found Breton, however, their prisoner had escaped all punishment. His head hung to his chest, his legs dragged on the floor. In his dying moments, his throat had rattled, his decomposing guts had gurgled, and he had passed gas in a not in the least bit humorous manner. They eased the carcass down onto an empty chair, in unison wiped their gloves on their legs.

  Meanwhile, the young woman described what had happened, so as to exonerate the newcomers for the man’s death.

  “He isn’t the only one to die this day,” the Captain said, spinning on his heels to face Kubin. “I’m afraid your tinkering in the kitchen comes too late, sir. I’ve seen a dozen corpses like this today. And one of them, in case you haven’t yet heard, is the Master of the Manor.”

  “Citrin?” Morrow gasped in dismay.

  “Yes. Your very gracious host. Your very forgiving host. Far more forgiving than I, I might add.”

  “And who, might I ask, is the new Master?” Kubin said.

  “That was what we were in the process of determining, sir. Though the matter is as yet unresolved, I will give you one piece of friendly advice.”

  Captain Breton stepped closer to Kubin, one hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Should it be decided that I become the new Master, you may want to take your chances in the hills beyond this place. You may still find a ruined manor in which to dwell…for as long as it takes until this plague of corruption, or the fauna, or the Pod visit your much deserved punishment upon you.”

  “I’m sorry for what’s happening!” Kubin barked. “But…”

  Morrow gripped his arm. “Kay…Kay, come along…” She drew him away, and at last out of the vast dining hall.

  “If he becomes their leader, we’ll be in big trouble,” Kubin ranted to his partner, who still held onto his arm as they walked.

  “We’re already in trouble, aren’t we?” Morrow told him quietly.

  - Nine: Appetites -

  Both Kubin and Morrow felt too defeated to return to what would seem to be their pointless efforts. Morrow went on to tell their assistants that they would discontinue work for now. The men nodded without protest. They had a defeated air about them, as well. They had been hearing of the escalation of the plague, the rash of deaths. They left the project to distract themselves with busywork elsewhere, and Morrow returned to where she had left Kubin, in his private apartment.

  When she poked her head up into his miniature loft, her breath caught in her throat. Kubin had his back to her, and was stripped to the waist, gazing into his mirror. From this angle, he blocked his own reflection. She could see his mask hanging from his right hand.

  She climbed the rest of the way into his room, and hearing her, Kubin began to turn. She dreaded the motion. His hat was off, his wig removed, exposing short dark hair not much unlike that of his former body. She had not seen this face without its mask. But that was not what caused her anxiety.

  What she dreaded was whatever Kubin had been studying in the mirror. She knew he would reveal to her a suppurating ulcer on his forehead…a milky, half-blind eye…a great nest of veins bleeding purple and red under the skin of his chest…

  But when he turned, he was pristine. There was not a mark, except for the dot of a mole on his upper chest. A mole which the wife who knew him as Venefice might have once playfully kissed. If anything, Morrow found that his features were even more beautiful in this incarnation than the one she was so familiar with. Her breath did not come back to her quickly.

  “My father is white, and my mother is black,” he told her. “I don’t think you ever knew that.”

  “No, I heard that. I could tell from your features, if not your coloring.”

  “I’m so different, here.” He smiled wanly. “So are you.”

  They faced each other, only a few paces apart. Slowly, in dream-time motion, Morrow’s gloved hands rose to her delicate mask…and lifted it from her face.

  Kubin closed the space bet
ween them by another step. In this dollhouse of a room, it brought them almost toe to toe.

  “Why don’t you take off that crazy wig,” he suggested, still smiling.

  Morrow smiled, too. “Why don’t you help me?”

  Watching her hands go up to unpin the mass of hair, hair perhaps made from the heads of people now long turned to dust, Kubin whispered, “You’re so beautiful.”

  But when he reached out to touch her face, it was the one spot of corruption on her that his fingers gently caressed…

  They were still in bed, entwined in sheets and limbs, both beginning to doze into a slumber not unlike that in which their equally nude and nearly as close bodies shared so very distant from this place. But a heavy thumping on the panel in the floor jarred them out of the prelude to dream. Wrapping a sheet around his lower body, while Morrow slipped deeper under another, Kubin lifted the hatch…and one of the repairmen assisting them on the filter project poked his head into the room.

  “So very sorry, madam,” he panted, “and sir. But I have to warn you.

  We’ve heard that Captain Breton has bullied the others into accepting him as Master of the Manor. And we’ve heard that he plans to have you three arrested immediately…”

  “Bastard,” Kubin hissed, dropping the sheet and scooping up his clothing from the cushion of a chair. To the repairman’s horror, the woman practically vaulted out of bed — her body and, most shockingly, her face laid bare—and instead of donning her white gown, she began putting on another of Kubin’s costumes. She didn’t take the time to explain that his breeches would make more sense than her hooped skirts, in battle or in flight. Neither of them donned their wigs…or masks.

  “I have to go, now, before they see me,” the repairman said. “I am so terribly sorry…”

  They thanked him, and as the hatch lowered Kubin asked, “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to get Golding, first off,” Morrow answered.

  The most Kubin could find by way of a weapon in his apartment was a walking stick. He and Morrow ran down the length of the hallway until they came to the brass plaque, bolted to the wall, with the number of Golding’s tiny flat engraved on it. Kubin rapped on the hatch with the cane. No answer. Had Breton’s men, perhaps the undead guards under his command, already come to drag their partner away? But when he rapped again, the hatch was lifted…and Kubin nearly gagged on the miasma that billowed down into his face. Reluctantly, holding his breath, he scrambled up into the room, where he clapped a hand over his nose and mouth. Morrow, behind him, did the same.