Nocturnal Emissions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The young man who stood before them was very tall, very thin, with a red goatee. Behind him, the bed was a hillock, a humped shape draped entirely by a blanket…with several dark stains blotting through The horrible effluvium radiated from there.

  “Where’s Golding?” Kubin demanded, his eyes on that awful shrouded lump.“I’m Golding,” said the young man, in an unfamiliar voice.

  “What?” Kubin looked at the youth. Golding, in this world, was stout…middle aged…

  “Oh God,” Morrow whispered. “Gee…what have you done?”

  “I was falling apart. It began with my bullet wound that had healed. It began to unheal. In a matter of hours, I was like a leper,” this stranger said, watching them warily. “This young man lived a bit down the way, and when he saw I was having trouble he was good enough to help me up to my room…”

  “You murdering son of a bitch,” Kubin said.

  “I didn’t really plan to do it, you know! It was more of an instinct. Does it really matter? We’re all going to die. So what if he lost a few days? So what if I gained a few?”

  “We have to hide, or leave this place…or fight,” Kubin told him. “Citrin is dead. Breton is in charge now. And he wants us captured.”

  “We can’t leave this place!” Golding exclaimed. “It’s poison outside!”

  “It’s poison inside. Like Breton himself suggested, we might find the ruins of another building. One has to be somewhere nearby. These people were an upper class…they depended on other communities, other manor-cities, for their services…”

  “I doubt we can fight them,” Morrow said. “I suspect that most of the Masque are still sympathetic to us…but I don’t think they’ll stand up to Breton and his followers.”

  “At least in fleeing we’ll have a chance, I suppose,” Golding muttered to himself, glancing helplessly around him. “A reprieve…for what it’s worth…”

  “Then let’s go—now,” Kubin said.

  Together, the three former explorers started down the length of hallway, in the direction of the nearest door to the outside they were aware of. They passed a man struggling down the narrow staircase to his loft, his face a mosaic of cracked, dehydrated tissue. He rattled, “You there…what are you up to?” They ignored him and kept moving…but after a few moments, Morrow heard a shuffling sound and glanced behind her. Not only was the man with the face like a dried mud bed loping along after them, but a woman with her wig soggy with gore, and with a ribbon of blood running from one eye of her enameled mask. Meeting Morrow’s gaze, the woman showed her red-slicked teeth in a grin and repeated the words Kubin had told her earlier: “You’re so beautiful.” But from her, the expression was tinged with a different kind of longing.

  “Keep going,” Kubin hissed.

  As if sensing their approach, a man climbed down from a ladder, hung there for a moment watching them. His jacket’s front was soaked in vomit.

  “They’re going,” he said loudly to himself. To everyone. “Our guests are going…” When they had passed him, trying to ignore him, he dropped down and joined the other two who were trailing behind…all three hunched forward like animals.

  Morrow shuddered, remembering how ravenous the revelers had been when first awakened—before they regained their sense of dignity, their facade of civility. When their most primitive instincts had alerted them to the danger of being reintroduced into a poisoned world. When those animal instinct had made them desperate to overpower and inhabit what they took to be uncorrupted bodies inside what they took to be mere suits. The instinct to survive, to consume, was too fierce to long hide under wigs and silk.

  Before the trio had reached the door leading outside, and even before Captain Breton’s party could search them out, there were already a dozen citizens limping, staggering, stumbling behind them. A few of them moaning in pain, or madness, or hunger.

  When the fugitives finally came in sight of the door, they broke into a run.

  Ten: The Pod -

  This face of the wall opened onto the beach of carbonized black sand…and spreading wide beyond that, the syrup-thick ocean of slime. The manor stretched from horizon to horizon, like a great city compressed and pulled like taffy into a seemingly endless line…with the sea running parallel in its own mock infinity. But that green ocean stretched infinitely ahead of them, as well.

  After spending so much time within the wall’s cramped confines, the openness of the outside world shouted its emptiness at them, disorienting the three escapees as they awkwardly pounded their way across the contaminated sand.

  “Shit,” Kubin panted, “we forgot what side that door was on! We’re trapped between the manor and the water!”

  “Run alongside the wall!” Morrow shouted back at him. “When they don’t expect it, we’ll duck into another door…then cut through to the other side of the wall!”

  A light rain was beginning to fall. Once Morrow had watched a downpour through one of the Manor’s windows, and she knew the drops would be heavy and greenish in color. But she had never seen a thunder storm here before.

  Though the heavens were no more or less gray than usual, she heard the rumble of thunder.

  They could see a body lying face down at the edge of the surf, a man with his cape flipped up over his head. He had possibly been killed by the two ray-like creatures which had alighted on him to feed…but Morrow thought it more likely he had drowned himself.

  Far out to sea, those three white domes of blank animal or vegetable matter floated serenely on, colossal, with flocks of the crab-legged rays roosting on their curved upper surfaces. The sky over the ocean strobed, and a lightning bolt forked out of the cloud cover, striking one of the apparent orbs. The bolt then fractured into a web of electricity that danced briefly over the orb’s entire surface. Streams of black specks, the rays, poured down its sides into the ocean, killed by the charge, leaving that one sphere oddly naked like the top of an impossibly huge skull.

  Morrow realized (as if some scrap of her body’s former inhabitant recognized them) that those three vast orbs—if viewed from far above—were positioned in a kind of triangular formation. Like the symbol of the Masque’s deity…

  “The Pod,” she said to herself as she ran.

  Golding tossed a furtive look over his shoulder, and blurted a mangled curse. It made Kubin look back. There had to be twenty pursuers now…and a few of the slowest of them were in the black garb of soldiers, with unsheathed swords in their hands. Several of the more frantic, more desperate of the group were drawing quite close, their speed mind-boggling in the face of their crooked, simian movements and the extent of their decomposition.

  They were gaining, somehow. Would soon overtake them…

  Kubin saw Golding abruptly shear off in another direction, apparently heading for one of the windows in the wall. Kubin had no breath left in his straining lungs to call after him. Fortunately, at least, it drew away a number of the Masque. He did his best to keep Morrow by his side.

  Morrow turned her face to him. Extended her arm toward him. Kubin took her hand. Their eyes were mirrors.

  There were barely human cries and shouts off behind them; the sounds of a wolf pack savaging its prey. Golding must have gone down, but they didn’t look back.

  In a moment, however, Kubin felt fingers claw at the back of his jacket. They pumped their legs harder, their white leggings spattered with the black grit. When Kubin looked again to see how Morrow was holding up, he saw her cupping the side of her neck and wincing. He thought she had been clawed there…but in the past few seconds a terrible pain had begun lancing through the front of his own neck, and his intuition told him what it was. Under this stress, their bodies were giving out. The injuries their hosts had died from—a neck broken, a throat slit against the green glass wall—and which had been healed, for a time, when they took possession of the bodies, were returning. Like Golding’s bullet wound.

  Suddenly, a young woman went racing past them at top speed, despite her great bell
-like skirts. A group of other Masque picked up their own speed to tear after her, capes billowing behind them like the wings of demons. She didn’t get very far; Kubin saw them tackle her, drag her down…pile atop her screaming form, burying it. Again, some intuition, some instinct of his stolen vehicle, told him what had happened. When the crowd had caught up with Golding, rather than him being pushed out of his body, he had sought to hide his identity by pushing himself into one of the bodies of the predators, taking his victim by surprise. But the ruse hadn’t worked…they had sniffed him out.

  And this time, Kubin doubted he would break free again.

  While his eyes were off her, Kubin felt Morrow tug violently at his arm.

  The pain exploded in his neck, and he stumbled, lost his footing. Their hands were wrenched apart. Off balanced, Kubin pitched forward, rolled, came up on one elbow. He saw what had happened. A number of the Masque had reached Morrow, and locked themselves onto her with bony talons or hands turning to sludge inside velvet gloves. Four of them pinned her to the sand, wrestling past each other like a frenzy of sharks, each trying to place a focusing palm flat against her chest. Each hoping to be the one to evict her from her body, and take her place within it.

  Three citizens crashed down onto Kubin, but before he lost sight of Morrow, their eyes met through the tangle of bodies. There was panic in them.

  But worse, an awful resignation. He recognized it, because he was experiencing it himself…

  Then the clawing, the pushing. Not so much of hands, but of minds.

  Minds scratching long cracked nails down the bone shell of his skull. A skull that was going to give out, give way beneath the pressure, like that cracking and crumbling green glass barrier…

  Faces hovering over him, changing as some were yanked aside to be replaced by others. Faces too close, too ravenous. The Masque were not so much decaying now, as self destructing with a terrible kind of violence, as if their cells were exploding in firecracker chains. A burst eye flowed out from under a mask, down a blue-black cheek pulled taut with swelling gases. Kubin still gripped his walking stick, and he stabbed it through the mask and into his attacker’s remaining eye. With a choked rattle, and the end of the stick jutting out the back of its softened skull, the creature fell off him—only to be replaced by another, this one a woman with the flesh of her cheeks sloughing off in great flaps, her lower lip flopped inside out, and blood foaming between the few blackened teeth still left in her grinning jaws.

  Was his own skull softening? Splitting at the sutures? Or was that just the insistent pushing of those many spectral hands in his head?

  Above him, beyond the faces, he saw the sky strobe again, but he did not see the lightning strike a second of the massive globes. The net of blue fire.

  The crisped sting rays falling away.

  One of his flailing hands was pinned under a knee. Someone bit into his other hand to hold it still. But then Kubin released the arch of his back, and stopped fighting. He did not try, like Golding, the trick of pushing at one of them. Crowding them out instead. He let go. He wanted to go…

  For a moment, he saw his own body beneath him…small…distant…

  before it was covered by those of the Masque.

  For a moment, he thought he was reborn as one of those rays. Soaring. But he was insubstantial, a tatter, a wind-blown rag.

  Impossible gulfs of space, time and dimension away, a body jerked, convulsed, then went slack on a table with its face buried inside a complex helmet of machinery. The other male body had already spasmed and then gone still, a couple of minutes earlier. His life support monitors showed a spiked mountain range…and then a low and infinite plateau. Like the body of the wall-city…

  A third bolt of lightning cracked the sky. The third globe was struck, enveloped.

  The third body on its morgue-like slab, this time a woman, arched her back violently as if electrocuted. Her heels drummed on the table that held her.

  By the time the monitoring techs had reached their consoles, it was too late.

  The three jumpers were dead.

  But Morrow could see. If this sense could indeed be likened to sight. All around her lay the sea. She was adrift. Had she survived the attack of those predators after all? Had they cast her on the waters, mistaking her as an empty husk?

  With a sense that could be likened to hearing, but was not quite, she heard someone calling her name. It was Golding. So Golding had survived, somehow, as well. Morrow swivelled her perceptions in his direction.

  The sight, or presence, of him did not shock her. She felt a kind of buoyant serenity. A calmness, as the poisoned waves rocked her. She swivelled her attention around behind her, and there loomed the vast white dome that was Kubin. She sensed his voice speaking to her, as well. This pleased her.

  From out here, the wall-city seemed so small…no longer arrogantly dividing land from sea; just a low, gray stripe tracing and merging with the horizon. Spectral. Dead.

  Flocks of rays that had been fortunate enough to be airborne when the Pod was struck by lightning came in to roost upon their rounded apexes. And they drifted, and slowly circled each other, but always remained in more or less a triangular pattern.

  They spoke to each other. And they would not be alone—ever. And they would be immortal, while all of the manor-city went silent inside, leaving only its many windows staring emptily like the eye holes in a gigantic, discarded mask.

  Channel 9:

  nocturnal

  emissions

  #1: The Ghost Factory

  Over the tops of the trees you can see the factory from my two livingroom windows that loom twice as tall as me since the ceiling of this old house is twice again as tall as it needs to be but that was the way they used to build these old houses a hundred years ago because often there would gather a thick blue mist a few feet to even a yard in depth that would sneak in unseen no matter how you tried to seal it out with putty and it would accumulate up there against the ceiling like a pool suspended above your head churning slowly sometimes fading to almost a haze but other times coagulating into solid matter that would later soften and dissolve again according to unknown conditions or alien seasons and I see grates in the ceiling that would help drain off this fog with the help of intake fans behind them but since the nearby factory that generated this fog is gone now the grates have long been plastered over leaving only shapes like fossil imprints but across the tops of the trees I can see from my windows the ghost image of that factory even though it closed its doors and was demolished forty years ago it is a negative blue image like something you’d see developing through the chemicals of a photographer’s tray an afterimage of residual energy imprinted on the place where the factory used to stand like a fossil in the air that glows brightly at night through the branches of the inter-vening trees a residual presence so strong you could almost climb its stairs if you could find your way inside it and I’ve heard that occasionally curious people and youngsters have found their way inside and sometimes you can see their glowing blue faces screaming silently from the factory windows and maybe this would account for the bodies that are buoyed along on the current of blue fog that flows down the street some nights according to certain conditions or alien seasons it is an almost solid current of blue ectoplasm like electric cold blue lava and floating on this current are mysterious corpses that have swollen to twice the size they should be like black balloons with blistered skin showing pink and metallic silver inside with silver mucus flowing from their nostrils and ears and anuses and their eyes stare silver and their mouths gape open in silent screams and you can look out from your windows and see them bobbing past on the surface of the fog until it begins to soften and dissolve and run off into the grates along the curb of the street that runs down the hill from where the old factory stood and in the morning sanitation trucks will come along playing tinny music like ice cream trucks and stop to collect the odd body or two like beached whales that sometimes burst I hear if they aren’t handled care
fully and wisps of blue gas will curl out of their ruptured bellies and someone told me they once saw this happen and heard a thin pitiful cry escape along with the gas like a genie freed from a bottle which is appropriate because it was bottles of medicine they used to manufacture at that plant a tonic of silvery fluid that when rubbed on the flesh eased muscle ache with its cool fire and stimulated hair growth when rubbed into the scalp but which caused the pupils and irises of one’s eyes to divide like amebas into two distinct nuclei in the white of your eye if you accidentally rubbed your eyes without washing your hands first and this double vision enabled the afflicted to look at you and see not only you but your double and this double would be moving differently from yourself and maybe weeping silently or smiling in a sinister way and mouthing unheard words or else this double would appear like a dead person though standing up if you were standing up and sitting down if you were sitting down and perhaps even covered in blood or missing its head in some terrible accident or dead from old age even though you yourself might be very young even a child but can you believe that some people actually rubbed this cold silver fire into their eyes on purpose or filled eye droppers with it so they could make their eyes split like amebas and see these visions deliberately yet it was this side effect that caused the company to go out of business and shut down though at night when the blue vapor starts coursing down the street like the pseudopod of some titanic ameba you can smell a cold medicinal fire on the breeze and the hair on your head will crawl seductively and I close the windows so I won’t smell it and I draw the shades but around their edges I can still see a phosphorescence that my landlady actually finds nostalgic but then you have to consider that her husband worked at that factory and she told me he and she would lie in bed at night and gaze up at the blue fog swirling against their high ceilings built so high to give the fog enough room to churn and they would sleep under its soothing glow like a blanket after all it was the source of their income like a sun that nurtured them a life-giving substance back then they didn’t see it as a kind of pollution and the old woman will actually go out on her porch on the nights that the fog pours down the street and rock in her chair by its ghostly light on the porch that runs along the front of this immense ancient house in which I have recently rented the studio apartment in back while another tenant and her young daughter rent an attic apartment and I think you could easily divide this sprawling house into a dozen apartments and still leave enough room for my landlady to live in but she’s humble and finds our two rents sufficient she lives frugally on her husband’s pension and I’ve heard her sobbing quietly in mixed sadness and fondness as she rocks on the front porch fond and nostalgic for days gone by when her husband rocked beside her and the factory was a physical solid place not a photographic negative behind the trees that she gazes toward in the night as if she’s watching her husband walk up the hill to work with his lunch box in hand smiling as if she might see him come walking back down the hill at the end of the day but I heard that he was one of the workers killed in an explosion that occurred a year before the plant shut down another big reason it ended up closing its doors and a tank burst and a river of silver fluid came gushing down that hill and the neighbors rushed out my landlady among them and children who got too close were swept off in the cold burning flood and my landlady had tears in her eyes when I moved in and she told me all this and how she saw her husband’s body in that flood of hair tonic burned black and crumbling like ashes but showing pink and silver inside and the woman who rents the attic whispered that one night the landlady rushed out toward the flowing blue fog of residual energy when she saw a ballooned body bobbing along that she took for her long-dead husband but the tenant grabbed the lady just in time and pulled her away from the fog’s cold burning touch and up close the old woman could see it wasn’t her husband floating past but just another overly curious teenager going into the ghost factory on a dare or a homeless person seeking shelter inside a mirage made more real by dementia or the desire for self annihilation though she still rocks out there on the nights the flood creeps silently down the hill as if she still waits for her husband’s body to be borne along again born again and maybe she hopes to dive into the flow and cling to his buoyant body and let the current sweep her away with him to wherever it may disappear