Camera Obscura (21 page)

 
 

She woke up to the wails of the insane.

  A cold, stark room of bare stone: darkness outside the window, lights down below – she was on a hill, the windows barred, the door closed – locked.

  The lights of Paris in the distance.

  At least, she hoped it was still Paris.

  Where was she?

  What had happened?

  Recollections trickling into her mind slowly, torturously. Weren't the Chinese said to have a special water torture?

  The Chinese…

  The Goblin factory.

  What had they done to her there?

  Darkness. She had been strapped to an operating table, and the Phantom was above her, and a butcher's cleaver came down–

  His thumb pressing against her eye, the pain erupting like molten gold–

  And something pushed
into
her, grating against the bones of her eye socket, and–

  Like larvae, hatching, reaching out–

  Something had settled inside her eye socket, something almost
alive–

  Her hand rose, but where her eye had been she encountered only a smooth, unbroken surface. Panicking, she grasped at it – it came away from her skin.

  An eyepatch. She stared at it in her palm, traced the smooth leather with her thumb. She raised her other hand and the motion took her by surprise, a smooth metal appendage almost hitting her in the face.

  Instinct made her close her fingers into a fist. But there were no fingers, and when she did and made to turn them, like a key, there was a burst of noise and the window exploded outwards, shards of glass falling away down to the grass.

  High-toned screeches from outside, a cloud of dark shapes bursting upwards.

  Bats.

  The screams intensified beyond the walls. Milady paid them no mind. She stared down at her hand. She could see the arm reaching down to her elbow, but where her elbow had been the human arm terminated, and something else continued…

  A cylinder, metal-smooth and light and strangely familiar…

  Running footsteps beyond the door, a key rattling in the lock. Cool air blew in from the broken window and she thought – I did that, and felt satisfaction.

  The door opened. Two women in nuns' habits. A syringe in one woman's hand.

  Milady, smiling grimly – her new arm raised before her, aimed at the women: "Don't come any closer."

  All she had to do was tell her brain to close her fingers, and turn…

  Her beautiful new arm: they had given her a Gatling gun for the fingers she'd lost.

  And someone had left it loaded.

  She laughed then, and the two women backed away a step.

  "You are very ill," the one with the syringe said. "This will help…"

  "Stay away from me."

  The women glanced nervously at the window, at Milady's extended arm. The Gatling gun –
her
Gatling gun – shone in the pale moonlight coming in through the window.

  And now the women seemed to decide to obey.

  Good.

  "Where am I?" Milady said.

  Flashes of memory – the under-morgue, the Phantom with his knife raised high, descending, descending…

  She pushed herself away from the bed. Standing – both legs seemed to work fine.

  What had they
done
to her?

  The two women exchanged glances, didn't speak, and she knew they were no nuns–

  A thin stiletto blade sliding out of the second woman's sleeve – the other ready with the needle – "Don't even think about it," Milady said. She tried bending. She was almost entirely naked, she realised – dressed in only a patient's cotton shift. She could see her leg.

  Her new leg.

  Metal had replaced flesh. She couldn't feel it – but it held her up, and when she tried to move the leg obeyed her, moving as it would have done before.

  Even better than before.

  "Where am I?" she said again.

  The two women exchanged glances once more – the knife flashed – Milady's hand jerked once, twice, and the nun's habit was stained red, the knife cluttering to the floor. The screams beyond the door rose higher, a cacophony of laughter or rage, it was impossible to tell. Milady said, "Fly, little birds–"

  The two women fled, the knifewoman holding her wounded arm against her chest.

  She could stand. She could shoot. What more could she ask for?

  The fragment of jade embedded in her cranium seemed to thud in her head. Suddenly dizzy, she sat down hard on the bed. When she closed her eye – eyes? – the room disappeared–

  Was replaced with mists, and voices whispering, and she seemed to be flying, cutting through the mists like a blade, heading towards–

  She opened her eye – eyes? – she could no longer tell – and the mists were gone, and she was back in the empty room. She found the eyepatch on the bed and put it back on, and the thudding in her head quietened down. A wardrobe by the window, and she went to it. Her clothes hung there, pressed and cleaned. She dressed, one-handed and clumsy, put on a long black trench coat – felt complete again. Her dark shades were in the pocket of the coat – she left them there. This place was dark enough.

  Quiet now. The wails had ebbed. Presences beyond the walls. She had a feeling she knew where she was. Somewhere she had never wanted to visit–

  Black leather against her skin – inside the wardrobe was a mirror and she looked at herself – Milady de Winter, her face thinner than it'd been, an eyepatch like a pirate's over one eye, a machine gun in place of an arm.

  She almost laughed. If only Barnum could have seen her, he would have offered her a job again in a second. She wondered what A– her first husband would have thought, if he saw her. Then she decided she didn't particularly care.

  Voices whispering beyond her new eye. She could see through the jade, she realised. Eyes, then. But what she could see…

  The Phantom's thumb pressing on her eye, the pain exploding in burning hot waves – the jade fragment pushing in,
adjusting
itself to her eye socket, sending out exploratory tendrils… no. She shook her head and the past disappeared. She was alive. That was what mattered now.

  The door had been left open. She stepped through it.

  A long corridor. Doors set in equal intervals. The cries and shouts came from beyond them. Cells, she thought.

  A home for the insane.

  She walked down the corridor. Grilles set into the doors, little observation windows. She peered through one:

  A hunched man by the window, humming to himself. She did not recognise the tune. He had a jar in one hand and a spoon in the other, and he was laying a thin layer of powder on the windowsill.

  Sugar, she thought. Flies buzzing around the man – she could smell him even from where she stood. As she watched the man, still humming, he put down the sugar bowl and the spoon and snatched at the flies. She stared, repulsed, as he caught and swallowed two in rapid succession. Milady drew back, but as she did the man's head snapped to the door and he hissed. She took a step back. The man's face appeared in the observation window.

  "Have you come from
him
?" he said. "I have been waiting. I have been good. I have been hoarding flies to catch the spiders to draw the birds." He hissed again. "Their taste is in my mouth." His dark eyes looked into hers. "Help me," he said.

  Instead she stepped away and heard wails rise from that cell, and the sound of a heavy body crashing, again and again, against the door, and a voice said, close in her ears: "He is beyond our help, but you are not. Come with me."

  She turned, and her new gun arm was raised, but they had crept up on her and had come ready: a group of the nuns, with guns in their hands, blocking the end of the corridor, and standing close to Milady – too close – was the man who'd spoken.

  "Lower your gun," the man said. "Please." His jowls shook when he spoke. He was the fattest man she had ever seen, and the most ostentatious. He wore fat rings over fat fingers with fat rubies and topaz and blood-dark emeralds set in the yellow gold, and his clothes were satin and lace and silk, and a hungry smile was stretched wide across his face, where fat red lips parted to reveal a fat red tongue. Not quite alive, she thought. But a semblance of life so remarkable it could have only been the work of the Council.

  "I am Citizen Sade," the man said, and smiled. "Welcome to the Charenton Asylum."