Camera Obscura (25 page)

 
 

Storm lashing the sea into rebellion; waves rising dark as empty houses; the wind howled, its anger beating against the ship. Milady thought:
The ocean doesn't want us here.

  She had lit a candle. Now she sat up, unable to sleep, every muscle tight with anticipation. The sounds of night scuttled through the ship like rats, and every creak and groan sent a shiver down her spine.

  They were coming, and she was afraid.

  On that long-ago journey to France, the hold was crowded with hot and sweating bodies. Babies cried incessantly. Flies, unwelcome emigrants who had jumped onto the ship, buzzed everywhere. We
are going to a better place
, her mother had said, whispering, holding her tight. But young Cleo still heard the unvoiced words that hung there, at the end of the sentence, like an empty noose in the breeze:
I hope.

  Hope was not a commodity worth buying. It died with her mother, died with the long voyage to the cold lands of paleskinned men and plump, hard-eyed women and obtuse machines. It died on the streets of Paris, cut away from her soul with a sharpened knife. Hope was dangerous, the noose promising only one thing.

  She had no use for hope.

  She had been afraid on that long crossing and she was afraid again now. Outside the porthole there was nothing but ocean, the Atlantic spreading out in all directions. The water was black and there was no moon, and the wind howled incessantly, like a dying baby.

  They were coming for her – and there was no getting away.

 

The second night out of Paris she dined with the captain at his table. Karnstein was a dour, solitary figure. She rarely saw his men –
the rat men
, she came to think of them for, like the rats who infested the ship, Karnstein's men were sometimes heard, but seldom seen.

  They were dining on chicken. A drumstick was wedged between the captain's lips, the grease running down into his thick black beard. The chicken tasted of cloves. Beside the captain's plate stood a tall glass filled with pure lemon juice. Every now and then he would pause, banish the chicken a short distance from his mouth, and take a long swallow of lemon juice. "Scurvy," he'd announce every time, a shudder making his face move as if a sudden earthquake had taken place across its tectonic plates. "Can't be too careful with Lady Scurvy. She'd eat you from the inside and make you bleed, every time."

  Milady nodded, and tore a chunk of bread, and chewed it. It was floury and hadn't been baked long enough, and there were little black dots scattered through the dough that suggested the unfortunate death of flies. It made her think of the man in the cell at the Charenton Asylum. The captain said, "You're not eating! Eat!" and pushed the chicken carcass towards her.

  "I'm not so hungry…" she said. The captain shook his head. "Eat every meal as it if were your last," he said, taking another deep gulp of lemon juice and shuddering.

  If I eat this meal, Milady thought, it almost certainly
will
be my last. The meal had the feel of a last supper served to the condemned. The small dining-room was dim and gloomy, with thick tapestries hanging over the walls. She found herself studying them, noting scenes depicting – what?

  Scenes of torture and battle; helmeted men with steel spikes attacking upright lizards whose weapons breathed flames; men dying with gaping, burning wounds; a captive lizard roasted alive above a fire; a flying machine mowing down soldiers with a hail of flying, metallic arrows; men running, lizard eggs captured, broken open; lizard young being stomped on; a castle, a siege; men hanging in rows from drab black trees. She said, "What is it?" and lifted a glass of wine to her lips. The wine had a slightly rancid taste.

  "That?" Karnstein said, turning – with some surprise, it seemed to her – to the ancient tapestries. "Flights of fancy," he said, waving the drumstick bone at the images. "Things that never happened."

  "It looks very… real," she said. The captain shrugged. "It's called The Battle of the Borgo Pass," he said. "An old legend from my homeland… fanciful, but it lends a certain élan to the room, don't you think?"

  "Quite," Milady said.

  It was hard to eat one-handed, though she was getting the hang of it, slowly. Her gun-arm rested on the table. She said, "Where is the cargo headed?"

  The captain put down his drumstick with some sadness and reached greasy fingers to tear a chunk of breast from what remained of the chicken. "Closed orders," he said.

  "Viktor mentioned a place called… Scab?"

  A grim smile etched itself, the way acid etches itself on glass, for a brief moment on the captain's lips. "Closed orders," he said again. And – "You are to confine yourself to your quarters while cargo offloads."

"Where?" she said. "We're in the middle of the ocean!"

  That smile again, and the chicken disappearing into it. She decided to change tack. "Aren't you worried about the cargo?" she said.

  "Should I be?"

  "It could be dangerous."

  "The ocean's dangerous," the captain said and then, unexpectedly: "I hate the sea."

  There was something wild and uncontrolled in the way he said it. His pupils, she noticed, had become dilated. His breathing grew heavy. She didn't speak again and, a short time later, excused herself from the table.

  After that she took all her meals in her cabin.

 

And now they were coming. She listened out for their sounds. The tread of feet on boards, the ghostly whisper of an icy wind. The
White Worm
grunted and groaned all around her. She huddled on the narrow bed, her back to the wall. Watching the door.

  Waiting.

  For here, on the ship, she was no longer Milady de Winter. The years had been peeled away from her with a knife and what remained, in the small, dank cabin, was a small and frightened girl.

  That same smell was in the hold of the ship when they had sailed to France… fear, sweat, bodies pressed together. "We're going to a new home," her mother had whispered to her. "A better place." Her mother's hope was like a candle. It had been easily snuffed. Or perhaps, she thought now, perhaps her mother never believed there was hope, but in pretending that for her daughter had tried to make it real, to wish it into being. Her body, like the others', was thrown overboard. By the time they arrived at port there were few enough of them left.

  She rocked herself, hugging her knees one-handed, her gun arm useless by her side. The dead never truly went away, she thought.

  She watched the door, waiting for them to come.

 
 

 
 

Sailing, with no land in sight, clouds in the distance assuming the shapes of imaginary continents, an entire alien cloudscape in the skies. Did someone live up there? Did cloud-women hunt amidst the grey-white landscape, did cloud-women fish from high above, dangling lines and hooks to snare a passing ship far down below? When she stood on the deck the air smelled of brine and tar and oil. It smelled cold, and she felt far away from home.

  A whale in the distance, rising to the surface, blowing out a jet of water before the immense dark shape submerged into the water once more. A school of flying fish skittered over the surface like silver bullets. Steps behind her – Karnstein, wrapped in his dirty coat, a pipe stuck between his teeth: "Whales are the Queen's eyes, they say."

  She didn't need to ask what queen he meant. In all the world there was only one that mattered.

  She remembered Victoria. During the time of her second marriage she had often visited the Royal Palace. A tall, dignified being, her tail long and royal, her eyes hard. There were pools – swamps – in the Royal Gardens, and rocks for the royals to sun themselves on. The queen had a disconcerting habit of catching flies with her quick, long tongue… And she remembered the whales in the Thames. It was said they followed Vespucci's ship when it returned from Caliban's Island, bringing with it a strange new future…

  "What's in the casks?" she said. Beside her, Karnstein chuckled. "You ask as if you already know the answer, Milady."

  A clear grey sea, no land in sight… no other ships, no birds this far away from land. A desolate place – but this was only above. What lay below? The ocean had its own life-forms, its own geography, its own mysteries… ones she never wanted to know.

  Somewhere deep down there, her mother–

  "How much longer?" she said. Karnstein tapped his pipe on the railings. Ash and loose tobacco fell and blew away on the wind. "Making good time," he said grudgingly, then – "Might be a storm coming."

  She left him there. Back in her cabin, the feeling of helplessness intensified. In the city, in the dark streets of Paris, she reigned supreme, but out here she was nothing but a prisoner, a captive of the waves…

  She knew what was – what had to be – inside the casks.
Bi
ological specimens – hazardous
. But she had to know for sure.

  When she stepped out into the corridor there was no one there. She reached the stairs – nothing. There was no sign of Karnstein's rat men. Quietly, she began her descent towards the hold.

 

  Why weren't they coming? She had
seen
them. She had made her way down into the hold. The smell of rot was strong, grew stronger the deeper she went. The darkness was near absolute – and yet, she could see.

  Green jade shadows like cold shuddering flames… She saw not with her human eye but with the other, that foreign object lodged into the hollow socket of her missing eye. The thing in her skull
responded
to the shadows, writhing inside, and she bit her lip or she would have screamed with the pain. The jade fragment was alive, it was reaching into her brain, it was… it was
excited
, she thought.

  Long wooden casks, bound in metal, were lined along the floor of the
White Worm's
hold.

  But why lie? she thought. Call them what they truly were.

  Coffins.

  Viktor's research, the Phantom's gruesome job for the Council: the corpses of the infected, the bodies of those, like poor dead Madame L'Espanaye, who were touched by that alien illness that had entered Paris.

  Though it was very dark in the hold, and the coffins were made of thick wood, she could nevertheless see them. Her jade eye showed her the interred corpses within their prisons. They were not still.

  Restless, the deformed figures in the coffins writhed and fought to escape. Silver strands oozed across their dead and bloated bodies.
A device
, she thought again, recalling her dream, the temple on the Mekong, and the man who looked a little like her, who looked
at
her…
a machine for recording the dead.

  Or did they fail to understand it entirely?

  There was a rustle in the shadows and she nearly jumped. She turned, heart beating, gun arm extended – jade-light showing her a bow-backed figure shuffling forward. Then a light flared, almost blinding her, and a gruff voice said, "Out of bounds, the hold is. What you doing here?"

  In the light of the hurricane lamp the hold looked ordinary enough. There were coils of rope and fishing nets and sea chests, and the casks that weren't casks were silent and unmoving, as if they held nothing much inside. The speaker was one of Karnstein's dour rat men: whiskers grew out of his pale face and his figure was hunched as if from the weight of too many years at sea. His coat, like his captain's, was dirty, patched in places, torn in others. He wore a cap low over his eyes.

  "Nothing," she said. "It was very dark, I–"

  "Out of bounds," the rat man said. "Nothing to see."

  "Perhaps if you could show me the way back–" she said, and then she paused.

  For just a moment, the man had raised his face, regarding her through rheumy eyes – and at that moment she saw it.

  A strand of silver-grey matter moving, almost sensuously, like a snake, across the man's skin.

 
 

 
 

The same ocean, different skies… She was on the deck of the smaller ship and the man was there too, the man who was a little like her. Kai. Somehow she knew his name.

  Kai.

  The jade lizard sat in the prow, surrounded by candles. Incense wafted on the wind.

  The man was leaning against the railings, looking out to sea. She approached him on soft feet. Above their heads the sky was a reddish-purple vista being slowly devoured by darkness. Stars were coming out, in ones and twos at first and then more and more of them, until the whole of the Milky Way was spread out across the sky from one horizon to the other.

  "The sky was purple like a bruise, fading to black…" the man by the railings said. She noticed he was holding a book in one hand. He said, "I like that."

  "Yes, Master," a voice said. She realised he was talking to his manservant, who was kneeling before the statue.

  "I will be glad when this is over," the man said. He stared out across the sea, letting the hand holding the book drop to his side.

   "Is it decided, then, Master?"

  "They will not rest until they take it from me," he said. His voice was so sad… She had the urge to reach out and touch him, stroke his hair. "I will sell it to them, instead."

  "For the right price, Master," the manservant said.

  "Yes… my life," the man said.

  
He doesn't want it,
she thought.
He is a captive of this thing as
much as I am
. She went and stood beside him. Together they gazed at the field of stars.

  "I don't understand it," the man said. He half-turned his head. Suddenly, she was aware of him looking directly at her. "I don't understand what it wants, what it does."

  She stood very still. The man suddenly smiled. "My silent ghost," he said. "Or am I
your
ghost?"

  "Master? Is something wrong?"

  "It is nothing, Manchu."

  She liked his eyes. She reached a hand, her human one, to cup his face, but her fingers left no impression on his skin.

  "They are quiet tonight."

  It was true. She could not hear the voices of the statue. "What do they expect to happen, when we reach Vespuccia?" he said. She tried to speak, to answer him, but no words came. "My silent ghost," he said again, and smiled, and then, as they did once before, his eyes looked beyond her and the smile melted from his face and he
pushed
at her–

  Startled, she stumbled back, fell over the railings towards the dark sea–

 

She woke up with her hair damp against her forehead, her heart hammering in her chest. How could she have fallen asleep? The door to her cabin was ajar. A narrow band of light pierced through into the room. A dark figure standing above her, leaning down…

  She saw a rat man and there were things crawling over his face, and silver-grey swirls moving in his eyes… Her gun arm rose instinctively, the muzzle almost touching the rat man's face. He paid it no attention, and his sick, dead eyes were fastened on hers, and now his hands, hands like claws were reaching for her and she–

  She fired, her arm pumping as the bullets shot out, hitting the man at point-blank range in the face, blood and bits of skull flying everywhere. And now she could hear a cry rising through the ship – a communal, wounded screech that echoed eerily down the corridor, seeming to merge with the groaning of the
White Worm.

  Infected, she thought, horrified. She struggled to her feet, her naked toes almost slipping in the pool of blood. They were all infected. The rat man had fallen away from her and was lying on the floor. Half his face was gone. Still, he tried to rise, fingers scrabbling blindly against the floor.

  She fired again, until he settled back and at last wouldn't move again. The silver-grey strands wove in and out of existence across his body, but as movement stopped they, too, were still.

  She had fallen asleep in her clothes. She put on shoes and her coat, one-handed. The smell of the dead man was on her. Another howl, coming closer.
They must be all over the ship,
she thought.

  And somehow, in there – amidst the fear and confusion – a sense of relief.
It's begun. They are coming, at last.

 

She had warned the captain. After the incident in the hold, she had run back up to the deck, gone straight to Karnstein.

  "A plague?" the captain said, hacking a cough around the word as if it were a sweet. "What's dead stays dead, Milady."

  "Not any more," she said.

  "Well," the captain said. He was rolling something in his mouth thoughtfully. She decided she really didn't want to know what it was. "We'll be reaching Scab soon enough. She'll know what to do."

  "Who?" she said – shouted – at him.

  "The countess," he said, as if surprised by her ignorance. "So, nothing's changed. Remember to confine yourself to your quarters when cargo–"

  "Is being offloaded, yes," she said. "But the cargo has already offloaded itself!"

  A look of distaste crossed Captain Karnstein's face and he hawked onto the deck. She stared, horrified, at the little glob of silver-grey goo.

  "It's strange," Captain Karnstein said, "but do you know, I've never felt better."

  She watched the little globe stretch itself across the boards of the deck. Slowly, meticulously, it began to draw itself towards her.

  She turned and ran.

 

Now she stepped over the still corpse of the rat man. The door, ajar. She reached, pushed it open, stepped into the corridor, gun arm at the ready.

  But where could she go?

  She was trapped in a place worse than any prison – for there was nowhere to go. Her warden was the ocean, and it was everywhere, hemming her in, offering no escape but a watery death.

  Were they all infected? She needed the crew. She did not know how to pilot a ship. She had once piloted a plane – a small, fragile, dangerous thing, but at least the land was always close…

  Here there was no land.

  Trapped.

  Stepping down the corridor, she silently cursed Viktor and the Council. The helplessness of her situation weighed her down. Stop, an inner voice whispered. There is no point in fighting any longer. This is how it ends – at sea, the way it had begun, so long ago.

  Her mother waited for her, beneath the waves.

  She decided to try to reach the upper deck. But when she reached the end of the corridor they were waiting, three of them, rat men in their tatty clothes, and their faces were hungry.

  They were very quiet. She said, "Please–" and raised her human hand before her, the fingers splayed. "You are sick. You need help."

  Their mouths opened in tandem. Their teeth shone wetly. Silver strands like eels crawled across their arms and faces. She took a step back. "What do you want with me?"

  They didn't answer. Together, they took a step towards her, gaining for themselves the ground she had ceded. "Who is piloting the ship?"

  No answer. What did they want with her? Somehow, the infection in the casks must have seeped out, infected the men…

  The statue. It was a mechanism of some sort, she knew that. A device for… she didn't know, exactly. All she knew was that it was spreading.

  As if in response to her thoughts, she felt the alien entity in her eye socket awaken. Her hand rose to her head, pain jolting her. The approaching figures of the rat men were illuminated in a jade-green light, and she could see the entire spread of the infection on them. It was…
responding
. Responding to the alien shard lodged in her cranium.

  
They wanted the fragment of jade.

  From somewhere, far, far away, whispering, insane voices:
quantum encoding of data at tertiary levels, chrono-spatial scan pro
ceeding, probe regeneration at full capacity–

  Instinctively she raised her gun arm, fired, rounds of bullets emerging out of the Gatling gun, pounding into her attackers, these walking dead men, sending them back, breaking them.

  She stepped through a storm of smoke and blood, gaining the stairs, running for her life.