Nocturnal Emissions (23 page)

“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 between 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.

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.