“James,” he spat through clenched teeth. “I can’t understand you. Just shut up.” The knocking continued for a moment, then stopped. Beckett sighed, then winced as a myriad of tiny sharp pains in his neck and shoulders saw their way clear through the drugs. He held his hand out to Gorud, indicating that the therian should hold back, then eased forward towards the first door. There were scattered, huddled shapes. None of them moved. The mad chattering was weirdly delocalized up here; no matter where he seemed to move, its volume and distance seemed to persist-as though those gabbling voices were not real sounds at all, but some alien part of his subconscious that had suddenly been given voice.
Beckett shook off the feeling, and carefully moved to the next room. This one, too, was empty. The third room…nothing moved in the third room. There were no huddled shapes, only one man on the far wall, who hung limply from where he’d pinned his left arm into the mortar with a short sword. Blood colored the length of the limb and most of his torso, and continued to expand in a smooth-edged circle away from his feet. A weird, puissant rainbow of half-formed, effervesced dreams flickered in a halo around the body.
There was no sure way to tell how long ago the man had died. Was he one of the three that Skinner had spotted upstairs, one that had finally succumbed to the self-destructive ravings that the oneiric weapon could draw out? Better to assume that there were still three left to go. He shook his head and moved on.
As the veneine faded, so did Beckett’s protection against the existential misery that lurked in his soul. Another dark hallway, another dangerously-disturbed man. Another threat, another monster. Navigating black, dangerous corridors, all while his body rotted out from beneath him, this had been his life for as long as he could remember anymore. And it would be his life until the fades finally claimed something irreplaceable-once they reached his heart, or lungs, or liver-he would die on his feet, pointlessly hunting some foul heresy. And when he was gone, men would continue; continue to threaten the safety of the Empire, continue to make monsters of themselves. The gloom shivered in his mind, strengthened by the reverberations of the oneiric weapon.
The fourth room was empty, too, just piles of broken furniture. Gorud shone his lantern across it, while Beckett gave it a cursory glance. The muscles in his gun hand throbbed fiercely now, and quivered in a way that presaged a cramp.
There was something…something moving there. He could see it, or he thought he could see it, through his blind eye. A flickering silhouette, a shape..a man drew himself up from his crouch behind the mislaid furniture. Blood caked his mouth and his hands twitched and writhed abominably, as though his fingers were struggling to violently detach themselves from their parent limbs. He chewed at his arms and shoulders, compulsively, like a dog trying to get at flees.
His mouth was a strange flower, an even circle of luminescent white teeth, long and curved like fishing hooks, like the petals of a lotus, they whirled and pulsed as he worked at his arms, cleaving meat and flesh away, freeing the strangeness within to the charged air that would give it shape and substance, congeal it from the imaginary to wickedly real…
“Mr. Beckett?” Gorud whispered. “Mr. Beckett!”
The man leapt forward, and Beckett screamed as a hideous, shrieking, twisting pain coiled through his arm. The agony brought him to his knees and caused the muscles in his fingers to clench-the gun went off, but the bullet went wild, tearing a chunk of stone and plaster from a far wall. His hand knotted into a fist, Beckett found he couldn’t release the trigger to fire again, couldn’t even let go of the gun…
Teeth gnashing the madman fell on him, frenetic fingers clutching, as he tried to secure a grip, tried to bite a chunk out of Beckett’s face. The coroner tucked his chin down, tried to keep his head low, as he struggled to tear the gun free from his frozen hand.
Gorud sprang forward then, leaving the lantern on the ground as he snatched at one of the madman’s arms. Using momentum to make up for his lack of mass, the therian managed to spin the human around and off of Beckett, then, still holding tight, dropped low and curled up, sending the dream-poisoned gendarme rolling over his back and into the darkness. The man crashed painfully to the ground, but was on his feet again in a second. Gorud howled, great teeth bare, prepared to bite.
Beckett held his clenched hand up and fanned the hammer of his Feathersmith with his good left hand. The gunshots were miniature explosions, again and again as the massive revolver punched holes in the stranger’s body, sending him staggering into the far wall. He opened his mouth and stretched it wide; for a moment, Beckett thought he saw that strange, toothy flower of a mouth again, before it was obscured by the colored spots left behind by the Feathersmith’s muzzle flash.
There was silence, then, broken by James’ sudden, furious spectral knocking. “All right?” Gorud asked him, over the noisy rattling.
“I can’t…can’t let go of the gun,” Beckett grunted, the pain in his arm brought tears to his eyes. “I can’t…” With one last heroic effort, he managed to lever the revolver from his right hand. The freed fingers immediately closed up, thought the pain remained. Panic surfaced too, as the sense that the muscles in his hand had been twisted around each other violated his body’s sense of integrity. “Damn it, James!” Beckett shouted. “I can’t understand you!”
The rapping continued, seeming to take on a panicked, hysterical edge to it. An alarm? A warning?
Gorud heard it, too. “Someone’s coming.”
“No,” Beckett said, a sudden realization dawning. “Someone’s getting out.” He groaned and lurched to his feet. “Shit. Come on.”
Gorud quickly grabbed the lantern, its light swinging nauseatingly across the walls, the hallway seeming to roll back and forth like the deck of a ship. The ground pitched wildly, and Beckett gripped his oar tightly, falling to his knees on the deck of the longboat. Up ahead, far, too far ahead, Fletcher’s cigar pulsed dim and red in the dark. He turned to look at Beckett, thorny green vines crawling from the black holes where his eyes were, and then his whole shape dissolved into a pale nimbus of light, revealing another man. A stranger, stumbling down the stairs at the end of the hall, trailing a thick smear of black blood and an aura of half-formed dream images-smiling faces, women with sultry eyes, spiders with long, snaking tales and hands with fingertips made of ice.
Beckett fired, left-handed, missed. He fired again, and the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. “Damn it!” He ran after the man, outpacing Gorud, whose lantern cast the coroner’s shadow ahead of them.
“No, no,” Beckett muttered, “Come on.” He tried to press a last bullet into its chamber, but dislodged the revolver. It fell to the ground with a clank, and scattered its ammunition across the floor, bullets vanishing into the scattering of shadows. “No!” He dropped to his knees, gasping as he felt the joint in his right leg explode, trying to ignoring the screaming pain as he searched for a bullet, just one bullet to load into the weapon. Something, anything. Gorud appeared beside him, nimble fingers playing across the debris-littered floor.
Driven by the violent, churning engine of fever-dreams that had grown in his heart, exploding outwards as radiation from the oneiric explosion had corroded the delicate partitions of his mind, the raving gendarme ran. The light burned at his eyes, but he pushed himself towards it as new, strange senses that itched about his skin told him of other minds and other pairs of eyes, and the new, blooming, degenerate and venomous lust drew him on, demanded that he vomit his stomach of poison and bile into their minds, to free them from the husks of rotting flesh into which they had suffered the misfortune of being born. He fled into the afternoon light, and looked out upon the looking eyes that saw him.
The thunder of gunfire stopped him short, and he didn’t bother to look down as he felt his dreams bleed free of his wounds. He felt his body dissolve into meat and filth, and the new strange minds inside his mind wondered if the world would still be there when he left it.
