The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  “But we have seen this before . . . in the common selkh moth on which our livelihood depends. The moths mate, lay their eggs—and die.”

  “But—where do they lay their eggs, Taziel?”

  I turned back to Khal. The creatures were slowly crawling off him, their wings ragged, all glitter dulled. I brushed some away and they dropped sluggishly to the floor, unable to fly. My fingers were smeared with dust from their decaying, disintegrating wings. Khal groaned, muttered incoherently. I bent over him in the dwindling dusk, trying to examine him; it was too dark to see clearly.

  “Bring light!”

  “He cannot bear the light – ”

  “I must have light!” There was something in the urgency of my voice that made him obey. As he held the lantern over the boy’s slim body, he saw what I had glimpsed in the gloom. Puncture marks. Bruised puncture marks, freshly darkstained with blood, marring Khal’s perfect skin, on chest, smooth belly and groin—as if he had been stung by a swarm of envenomed bees.

  “Dear God. Dear God.” The light flickered as the lantern rattled in the Tarrakhan’s shaking hand. He sank to his knees, laying his head on the boy’s breast. “He still breathes—have they drained his blood, are they leechmoths, are they –?”

  “No.”

  “Then—what?”

  “I do not know. I have never seen anything like this before.”

  “Taziel! I’m paying you to cure him!” Tears streamed down his cheeks. “Don’t let him die!”

  I have watched by Khal’s bedside for three days and nights now. There are so many similar cases in Perysse that I cannot number them. If I had not seen the moths crawling on the boy’s body I would have said from the marks that we were in the grip of some terrible Pestilence. But Khal’s torment lies within—and is struggling to get out.

  Sarillë is dead. She took poison; the Sleep of White Crystal that kills swiftly. I examined her body. Dear God. She was dead but they still lived. To see them wriggling beneath the skin, to see the undulation within dead tissue, maggots already gone to work in a corpse not yet cold –

  The Tarrakhan is losing his sight; his damaged eyes weep scalding tears. He will not leave Khal’s side though the boy’s mind wanders on far dark shores and he recognizes no-one, not even his lover.

  They burned Sarillë’s body today, although I entreated the authorities to let me cut the corpse open—if only to prove my theory that –

  Today I am certain I saw them again. The wriggling tracks beneath the skin. One beneath the left breast, another across the midriff, a third above the groin, a fourth in the thigh. Khal is being eaten away—from within. I pray the Tarrakhan loses his sight before he sees this living corruption in the ruins of his lover’s body.

  The nights are silent but for the wailing and screaming of those wretches who are infected. The moths have died by the thousand, their dry, dessicated corpses litter the streets and gardens. Yet still the craving for boskh drives the addicts to extraordinary practices: court ladies on their knees in their fine selkhs, scrabbling through the piles of street dirt, searching for a newly-dead moth with a taste of dust left on its wings; respected scholars gathering handfuls of the frail fragments to burn just to inhale a whiff of the dust; shrunken-faced addicts actually licking the brittle shells, crunching the furred bodies, avidly swallowing them down like sweetmeats –

  They hatched today.

  They burrowed their way to the surface and as dusk fell, they slowly oozed their way out of the yellowed pustules of corruption that have erupted all over Khal’s body. His screams –

  It is as I feared. It is just as I feared. They are parasites, these moth grubs, parasites that feed on live human tissue. Now I have proof. Sletheris, the grubs of these moths, emerge at about a thumb’s length, yellowish-pale and glutinous, like an oozing jelly; fattened on their host’s flesh and body fluids, they then weave a cocoon about themselves which they attach by a thin silk thread to their host . . .

  I have been to the Arkhan. With my proof positive. He has sent his Tarkhasters throughout all the Seven Cantons to destroy the moths. But it is too late. All Perysse is infected. And there seems no way to kill the grubs—without killing the Host.

  May Saint Mithiel protect us. We are doomed.

  When I returned from the Arkhan to Khal’s room, he –

  Even now, I can hardly write it. Khal dead. The Tarrakhan dying. He had slain the boy and then, in the manner of Iskhandar, thrust the razhir-blade into his own entrails, twisting it . . . an unspeakably painful death, the room reeked of spilt blood.

  He had dragged himself to the bed where the boy’s body lay and was trying to reach up to touch his hand. As I entered, he called to me.

  “Taziel . . . I could not bear to watch him suffer so—it was the—only way. See—that we—are consumed on the same pyre – ”

  When will this end? We have not enough wood or pyre-oil to burn all the bodies. Most, on learning what crawls within them, take their own lives. The looms are silent, the bazaars and quais are empty. Every household burns fumigating herbs; the city is choked with the bitter fug and the billowing smoke of funeral pyres hangs in a pall above Perysse both day and night.

  Weary. I am so very weary now. There seems to be no way that I, who call myself a physician, can do anything to alleviate the suffering. I truly believed this substance—boskh—to be a miracle, a cure for all the diseases we thought incurable.

  Now all I can do is stand helplessly by as my patients die, one by one.

  My esteemed colleague, Merindyn (who was apprentices with me to crabbed old Maistre Dyrnion) has sent for me. He has discovered a new case in the stews of the Seventh Circle, a girl prostitute known as “Mynah” (I am told she was gifted with a shrill whistle and a good ear for vulgarly popular melodies). This poor creature, abandoned by her pimp, must have lain some two weeks in her garret whilst the sletheris went about their work inside her.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before, Taziel?”

  In truth, I had become so used to horrors in the last weeks that I thought I could not be shocked by anything new. This is the most advanced case I have seen. The girl’s body lay encased within a web of soft, sticky selkh . . . most like a selkh cocoon and yet she still breathed within. From what I could make out beneath the glutinous threads, her eyes seemed open and unusually prominent and dark . . . she was Changing.

  “Tell no-one,” whispered Merindyn, “for they will destroy her if they discover her.”

  He related then that the good citizens of Perysse had burned three such . . . mutations in the courtyard of the Tarkhas Zhudiciar, calling them abominations of Ar-Zhoth. And I cautioned him to look to his own safety . . . the mood of the people is such that they will burn him as well as his patient if they find him at her bedside.

  Drawn back at night against my will to Mynah’s bedside. Scientific curiosity—or morbid fascination? I cannot stop thinking about that pale, emaciated body still breathing within its protective cocoon. What exactly are we witnessing here? When she wakes—if she wakes—what will emerge from this soft-spun chrysalis?

  She lies there naked but for the woven shroud of gossamer threads, oblivious of my presence, oblivious of this rheumy-eyed, weary old man with his wavering lanthorn and his laboriously scratching pencil. I have ensured the shutters are closed, no chink of light must give me—and her—away. (Strange. I cannot glimpse any trace of sletheri tracks on the white skin. I had thought—but now I wonder if I am wrong.)

  No voluptuous whore, this Mynah, just a scrap of a girl, scarce past puberty. Tender breasts, pink-tipped, wildrose buds that bloom amidst tangled briars on waste grounds –

  But I digress. It must be understood that my descriptions of the patient’s physical condition are merely set down for medical reasons.

  Fine drifts of long hair, so fair it seems white beneath the threads. I thought Merindyn had said she was dark, glossy-haired like the mynah bird’s plumage . . . But then these whoregirls will dye thei
r hair rainbow colours, tattoo their bodies, anything to attract the customers (so I am told.) If only her eyes were not open. I feel she is watching me. And yet—how could that be? Her pulse, her breathing, everything has slowed—she sleeps the deep sleep of the narcoleptic, of the comatose.

  I wonder if she dreams . . .?

  Moon glimmerlights the dust-drifted boards, the bare pallet . . . Moonmotes float, glittering, in the darkness. Glitter of sound, each radiant point of light a line of high, pure crystalline sound, spinning, weaving –

  Each gossamer threadline of sound encasing her vibrates, lulling her with a shifting texture of thin high starglitter; starmusic, spheremusic –

  Mothmusic –

  Dreaming. I must have nodded off a moment there. Not one night’s uninterrupted sleep since this cursed plague began but I used to be able to weather such hardships; I must be getting old. Yet still an echo of that reverberant threadhum in my ears, high, unearthly –

  Wax. Undoubtedly a build-up of earwax. I must remove it or I may go deaf; some gently-warmed olive oil should do the trick.

  I had not intended to return. But, called to a child with the quinsy in nearby Naseberry Lane, I could not resist the lure and crept up the cobwebbed stair in the dark to her garret to see if she still lived.

  She had shifted a little within the protective threads. Moonlight glistened on her palesilk hair, her soft white body. Even as I leant over her, I caught the breath of a sigh, so faint it was but the beat of a moth’s wing.

  I am certain sure now that she is not Hosting sletheris, that the smooth skin is unmarked because there is no infestation beneath. What I have been observing is some unique process of change—of metamorphosis—of translation into Something Else. I can only conclude that the ingestion of boskh stimulates—or triggers—this state of irreparable Change in certain susceptible individuals.

  If only she would wake. There is so much to be learned from her, so much she could tell. And yet I dare not disturb her; they say that wakening a sleep-walker only results in madness, dementia.

  Away just before dawn with a heavy heart. How long now until she is discovered? How long?

  I cannot stop thinking about her. Mynah. As I go about the silent streets from household to household to administer what little treatment I can offer to my dying patients, I see her pale face, I hear again that strange, high music, I cannot wait for night to fall so that I can slip back to her garret.

  So tired today. Two dead in Spindle Lane; three new cases of blindness confirmed; one whole household found dead in Shuttle Alley, it seems the master had gone mad and killed them all, even his little babe in the cradle. Is there no end to it? If only there were some way to –

  “Ta—zi—el . . .”

  She is calling to me, her translucent body naked except for the drifting skeins of her whitesoft hair. She leans from the casement, calling to me and as she calls the moonlit night glitters with the fall of petals from the black sky. And the aching sweetness of her voice makes me want to weep with its promise of release.

  “Let go . . . drift away . . .”

  I woke to find I had fallen asleep, my head on my open journal, the quill pen leaving a dark smeared blot over my last entry . . . The ink was wet, blurred with water.

  Saltwater.

  “Once you find yourself weeping,” Maistre Dyrnion used to say, “then you know it is time to retire. Cultivate the art of detachment, Taziel. Detachment is an essential skill for a physician.”

  I should have retired last year, left the city, gone to end my days in the quiet of the countryside. Now there is no escape. Even if I can offer no hope of cure, someone has to comfort the dying, someone has to close the sightless eyes, to pull the sheet over the still, set faces of the dead . . .

  Moonlight powders the dusty threads of her transparent shroud. Soft curves of her white-fleshed body beneath, breasts whose delicate nipples are round and pink as little shells. So long since I touched a woman—in that way. O, a physician may touch a hundred women in the course of his work, from tender maids to raddled crones—but all for information’s sake, not for his own pleasure –

  She stirs.

  Can she hear my thoughts, can she sense the heat of my desires? She is so weirdly beautiful, lying there swathed in the white filaments of her hair. From the diseased body of this drab little prostitute, a new creature is emerging, white, virginal—inviolate.

  Should I waken her? Slit the dusty webs, take her in my arms, feel that soft, naked skin, that whitepeach bloom against my cheek?

  Stay a moment, Astar Taziel. The boskh has infected your brain, stimulating obscene desires, unnatural lusts with its insidious musksweet fragrance. It had to happen . . . I have been inhaling the stuff for weeks now. But to have so nearly transgressed the ethics of my profession, to have so nearly –

  I must never come here again. This must be my last visit.

  “Farewell, Mynah,” I whisper, my hand straying out to touch the sticky threads, pulling back at the last moment. Is it just my heated imagination—or does she murmur softly as the shadow of my hand falls across her face?

  A straggle of hooded Hierophants was approaching, mumbling chants and burning bitter herbs in their clanking thuribles. In their wake followed the Believers. The fanatics. The zealots.

  The greylight was bright with their spluttering torches, the air harsh with their monotonous chanting.

  “The fires! The fires! Come to the fires!”

  “Well if it isn’t Doctor Taziel,” a sharp voice said, a splinter piercing my ear.

  Farindel. Clerke to the Haute Zhudiciar. Skilled in the ways of inquisition.

  “You’re out late, Taziel.”

  “So many patients to attend to.” I waved my hands a little too animatedly, hoping my journal with its sketches and notes was safe concealed within my robes. The heat from his torch was making me sweat; must he hold it so close to my face?

  “I am told there’s one of them sequestered here-abouts,” he said, “and the Arkhan’s word is that they must be destroyed. Fire.” He smiled at me, showing teeth stained from chewing anise root. “They cannot resist it. Moths are drawn to the flames – ”

  A hoarse shout from down the lane. I closed my eyes, praying. Not Mynah.

  The Hierophants had made a circle with their torches. I turned to go but Farindel grabbed me by the arm; remarkable strength in his grip for one who makes his living pushing a feather quill over parchment.

  “Watch.” Again that slow smile.

  And in the confusion of jostling figures, the waving torches, the jeering shouts and cries, I saw a pale figure at an upper window, a whitewraith, a phantasm, more moth than human.

  For a moment, the creature seemed to hang, to float in the very air above the flames. I could not avert my eyes. Illusion. It must be illusion –

  The fires caught light. That gossamer whiteness crackled, burned, the creature came thudding to the ground and the Hierophants closed in, hacking, stamping, crushing –

  The stench of charred flesh was overpowering. I tried to pull away but Farindel had my arm clutched tight within his grip, his eyes glittered fanatically in the pyrelight.

  “As physician it is your duty to bring such cases to my notice, is that understood? It would be counted a heinous crime to harbour one of these daemonspawn, Taziel. They must be eradicated. For their own good as well as for the safety of the people.”

  You are in danger, my beloved. They want to destroy you.

  They do not understand.

  How can I protect you from the firemobs that roam the streets by night, seeking to draw you and your kind to their flames? Farindel suspects me, I am sure of that. He may have set a watch on my house. As I go about my visits, I think I am shadowed: a glimpse of a watcher slipping out of sight as I turn to look behind me; a flash of movement caught on the edge of the eye’s seeing . . .

  And I can think of nothing but you, Mynah. Even your name stirs an echo of that crystalline music. Let me hear it
one more time, let me hear your voice again, more potent than boskh, more achingly sweet, with its promise of healing.

  Of release.

  The pull was too strong. I could not help myself. I had to go back. I had to see her. Somehow I knew it would be tonight.

  The music was no more than an echo in my memory at first. Then it became more insistent, an iridescent melody that would not leave me be, wreathing round and around my brain.

  And as I drew near the shoddy alleyway, as I crept over the refuse-strewn gutters, the music grew stronger, more piercing—more alluring. I stopped in the dark beneath her tenement house and listened. A single moonshaft lit the ragged tiles of the roof, the high open casement with its cracked panes.

  From that open casement the music issued, a single, unbroken thread of silverspun sound, liquid as moonlight.

  It ravished the soul to hear it.

  Now I knew. She had awakened. She was singing.

  In the far shadows of the moonlit garret a frail figure, tall and slender, stood watching me, its dark eyes huge and sad. Clothed only in its long drifts of floating hair, white as spun sugar, it lifted one hand to me, whether in welcome or denial, I could not be sure. The long fingers were webbed, the tracery of veins in the transparent skin as delicate as a skeletal leaf, hoar-dusted by winter frosts.

  “Mynah?” I said. My voice was unsteady, hoarse with a vivid, unexpected emotion. “I mean you no harm. I—I am a friend. A physician. I have watched over you whilst you slept. I—I – ” My words trickled away to nothing. I just stared.

  And the thing that had been Mynah stared mutely back at me.

  “You cannot stay here,” I said all in a rush. “If they find you they will burn you. You must come with me. Look. I can conceal you in my cloak.”

  For a moment I thought my Mynah had lost all powers of understanding. But then—O miracle—she slowly nodded her head. And I ventured closer, untying my old worsted cloak and hesitantly offering to wrap it about her frail shoulders. She allowed me to do this—and as I did so, my hand brushed against her bare skin. Such a texture—softer than velvet but with the pile, the bloom of a moth’s wing. And with that touch, a faint echo of that lost vision, that still, starlit darkness, that promise of . . .