Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (41 page)

What the cycling outer airlock door revealed was more of a shock than it might have been if she hadn't already been dragging her tongue across her teeth in a futile effort to scrape the stench of death away. The membranes between the struts were not glossy with health, appearing dull and tacky instead, but the amazing stink that left her lightheaded and pained even within the oxygenated confines of her helmet had led her to expect—well, what course did decay take, on a boojum? Writhing infestations? Deliquescence? Suppurating lesions?

There was none of that.

Just the ridged stretch of intact-seeming corridor disappearing into the curvature of the dead ship, and the reek of putrescence.
Don't throw up in your helmet
, Cynthia told herself. That would be one sure way of making things even less pleasant.

The
Charles Dexter Ward
retained good atmospheric pressure—though Cynthia couldn't have attested to the air quality—and she didn't need to tongue on her suit intercom for Wandrei and the others to hear her when she said, "Isn't anything we salvage from this mess going to be unusable due to contamination?"

Meredith said, "Anything sealed should be fine. And we wouldn't want unsealed medical supplies anyway."

"I can smell it through my suit."

Wandrei looked at her with curious intensity. "Really?" he said, brow wrinkling behind his faceplate. "I don't smell anything."

"Maybe your suit has a bad filter," Meredith said. "We do our best to check them, but, well." She shrugged—a clumsy gesture, but Cynthia understood. When everything the Arkhamers owned, from their clothes to their ship, was second-hand, salvaged, scavenged, there was only so much they could do.

"That's probably it," she said, although she wasn't sure—and from the look he gave her before he turned away, Wandrei wasn't sure, either.

"Let's see if we can't find the crew of the
Calico
," he said.

I am walking in a dead body
, Cynthia said periodically to herself, but aside from the eye-blurring stench that no one else could smell, the only sign of death was the darkness. Every boojum Cynthia had ever traveled on had used its bioluminescence to illuminate any space its human crew and passengers were using. But the
Charles Dexter Ward
stayed dark.

They proceeded cautiously. Cynthia remembered Hester saying the crew of the
Charles Dexter Ward
might still be alive somewhere in their dead ship, and there was the nagging question of the
Calico
's crew—a question that got naggier and naggier the farther they went without finding a single trace of them.

"We know they weren't on their ship," Hester muttered. "Corinne hailed them until she was hoarse."

"And they haven't been salvaging," Meredith said. "None of the doors since the airlock has been forced open."

"My question," Cynthia said, "is how long they've been here. And if they aren't salvaging, what are they doing?"

That was two questions, and actually she had a third: what did Wandrei know that she and Hester and Meredith didn't? He didn't seem worried, and she had noticed after a while that, although he wasn't in a hurry, he did seem to know where he was going. She didn't want to be the one to mention it, though. Not a good idea for the politely tolerated outsider.

"What else can you do on a dead boojum?" Hester demanded.

"Maybe," Cynthia said after a moment. "Maybe they weren't here for salvage in the first place. Maybe they needed a hospital. Not all doctors are as laissez-faire as Captain Diemschuller."

"The
Calico
's too small for piracy," Meredith said, "but I agree with your general principle. If they aren't here for salvage—how do we find the operating theaters?"

Her question went unanswered as they came to a corridor junction and caught sight of another human being.

He was in shirtsleeves rather than a pressure suit, wearing the uniform of the Interplanetary Ambulance Corps, dark blue with red piping and
CDW
embroidered on his sleeve. Across his chest were blazoned a row of symbols including a caduceus, a red crescent, and the Chinese ideogram for "heart." Despite being distracted by the medical symbols, Cynthia knew there was something wrong with him several seconds before she was able to identify why she thought so. And the man—youngish and tall, his skin fishbelly pale in their floodlights—stood and stared at them, his face so perfectly blank that Cynthia finally realized that was the problem. No relief, no anger, no fear—not even curiosity.

"Hello!" she said, starting forward and forcing brightness into her voice as if she could compensate for his nullity. "I'm Dr. Feuerwerker with the
Jarmulowicz Astronomica
. Is your captain—" And then she was close enough to see him clearly, close enough to see that the shadow at his midsection was not a shadow but a hole, jagged-edged and gaping, where his stomach used to be, close enough to see the greenish tinge to his pale skin.

Her voice was thin and screechy in her own ears when she said, "He's dead."

"What?" said Hester

"He's dead. He's been dead for weeks."

"But he's standing up. A dead body couldn't…" Hester's voice dried up with a faint click as the dead man turned, giving them a good view of his disemboweled torso, and started walking down the hall away from them. His locomotion wasn't perfect, but it was damn good for someone who'd probably been dead for three months.

Hester started to blaspheme, and Meredith urgently hushed her. This was not the place to be attracting that kind of attention.

"It might be a parasite," Cynthia said, having run frantically through her knowledge of what could animate a corpse. "Something that got through a gap in spacetime when the
Charles Dexter Ward
died. We have to tell the
Jarmulowicz Astronomica
"—surprised, Cynthia realized her concern was not for herself, stuck here in the belly of a dead boojum, but for Jaime and the shy children and the cheshires Cynthia couldn't count—"can we call them from here? How far back—"

"Calm yourself, Dr. Feuerwerker," said Wandrei. "What you see is not the work of a parasite. It is the pursuit of knowledge."

That brought her up short. She looked at him, calm and sweating behind the faceplate of his pressure suit, and swallowed against a curl of bright nausea. "You knew about this?"

The twitch at the corner of his lips was more disturbing than the dead man striding away from them. Hastily, Cynthia turned her attention forward again. There were medical-school stories of the horrors Arkhamer doctors got up to. Cynthia had never credited them, considering them part of the general anti-Arkhamer bigotry that permeated so many institutions of higher learning—and so many spacedock taverns.

Now she wondered if she had been too willing, in her conscientious open-mindedness, to assume there was no truth behind the slander.
Ooh, ethics now, Dr. Feuerwerker? That's a new look on you.

She stepped forward, following the dead man. Wandrei and the other women jogged to catch up, their pressure suits rustling with the sudden movement. As Wandrei fell back into stride beside Cynthia, she said, "So when did the
Charles Dexter Ward
sign on an Arkhamer doctor?" Wandrei remained silent, though she waited after each sentence before adding the next. "That's what got the ship killed, isn't it? That's the real motive behind coming here."

"Reanimation isn't a topic we commonly pursue," Wandrei said. "But if… if someone has made it work—think of the advance to human understanding. To medicine."

"To shipping," Meredith said.

"There are a number of applications," Hester was beginning, when Cynthia almost-shouted, "Are you fucking nuts? Every scare story I've ever heard about raising the dead says that either dying or coming back drives people mad. Are you really suggesting —"

"Are you a scientist, Dr. Feuerwerker?" Wandrei asked. "Then I suggest you wait for the data."

The walking cadaver did not move particularly fast. When she caught up to him, he turned to her, jaw moving. If he was trying to say something, the lack of lungs and diaphragm impeded the process. Upon closer inspection, he was a Major and a registered nurse. The name on his shirt pocket read
Ngao
. His eyes, dull and concave where the ship's environment had begun dehydrating them, fastened on Cynthia's face through the helmet.

His jaw worked again.

Was he conscious?
she wondered, the chill running up her back so real that her head wrenched to one side.
Did he know he was dead? Eviscerated? Did he ever try to touch his stomach and have his fingers brush his spine?
She wanted to apologize, even though Major Ngao's fate was none of her doing. But she, too, had sought after forbidden knowledge—not reanimation, at least the irony wasn't that cruel. She'd muttered those same words about science and the pursuit of knowledge and told herself that Chen and Derleth would be pleased. That Galileo would be pleased.

Had it been a lie? She didn't know. Chen and Derleth and Galileo had been dead for centuries. She couldn't ask them—and even this lunatic on the
Charles Dexter Ward
couldn't bring them back. She remembered her burning certainty that the truth was there, attainable and valuable beyond any price—and she remembered Captain Nwapa's expression, too, that one flicker of horror before the captain got her game-face back. It took a lot to rattle a boojum captain, and Cynthia was not proud of the achievement.

Wandrei said crisply, "Take us to Dr. Fiorenzo," before Cynthia could find any words that weren't trite and false—
and probably pointless, really, Dr. Feuerwerker, the man's missing nine-tenths of his vital organs, do you think he has any attention to spare for you? And if nothing else
, Cynthia thought grimly,
now at least she had a name to hang the nightmare on.

§

The corridors of the
Charles Dexter Ward
were dark and silent as Cynthia followed the Arkhamers following the dead man. From time spent on the
Richard Trevithick
and other boojums, she knew a little about their internal architecture, and she'd done her best to stay oriented, so she was fairly sure that they were heading away from the rending plates and tearing diamond teeth of the
Charles Dexter Ward
's mouth (and she couldn't help wondering if his crew had called him Charlie, the same way the
Richard Trevithick
's crew always referred to their boojum as Ricky—it was a stupid thought and wouldn't be banished). The anatomy of boojums adhered to no principle that Terran mammals abided by, including bilateral symmetry, but if you were headed away from the mouth, you were probably headed toward the cloaca. And most ships' systems were stuck as deep in the bulk of the boojum as the bioengineers could get them.

The
Charles Dexter Ward
being a hospital ship, there was not one specific area that Cynthia would have identified as the sickbay. Rather she and the others had passed corridor after corridor of clinical chambers and wards, rooms that Cynthia was sure would have reeked of disinfectant and that eternal powdery medicinal smell were it not for the eye-watering putrescence overwhelming everything. They found the operating theaters, which looked as if they'd been the scenes of intense guerrilla fighting, and Cynthia's pace slowed automatically, trying to reconstruct what had happened, where the defenders had been, how the line of attack had run, whether that was all human blood in horrible sticky pools, or if some of it was other colors.

"Dr. Feuerwerker," Meredith said, pointing, and she saw that farther down the corridor, in the direction that Major Ngao was plodding, uninterested in what might have been the site of his own death, there was, for the first time in hours, a gleam of light that they hadn't brought with them from the
Caitlín R. Kiernan
.

And as they followed the dead man—he dripped, occasionally, an irregular trail of brownish fluid on the floor—around the bend in the dead boojum's corridor, Cynthia saw an open pressure hatch, a slice of light spilled across the floor, and a glimpse of one of the medical labs.

Within it, she could just make out some white-coated movement.

She followed Wandrei, she thought, because she had so little idea what else to do.
This is how war crimes happen. People get overwhelmed and follow orders. If you were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, you'd know what to do besides whatever Wandrei tells you.

And then she bit her lip inside the helmet and thought,
If I were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, the
Richard Trevithick
might be as dead as Charlie here.

That thought chilled whatever part of her the quietly guiding dead man had missed.

Something brushed Cynthia's right glove, then grabbed it. Her throat closed with fright, and she turned as she tried to pull away, looking down to see what horrible thing had caught her. But it was a suit gauntlet, tight against her own, and when she looked up again, she met Hester's gaze dimly, through two helmet bubbles glazed with the reflected light of the lab up ahead. She'd stopped, lost in thought. The idea of being left out here in the dark with the stars knew what made her heart jump like a ship's rat in the claws of a cheshire.

She squeezed back and caught a flash of Hester's teeth, bright against the darkness of her face. They moved forward together, though any comfort from the other woman's presence was abrogated by a series of scraping sounds that Cynthia's medical ear easily identified as metal on bone.

Five more steps brought them into the lab. Cynthia found herself fascinated by the way the light—clip-on work lighting trailing to batteries, and not biolume—caught on the scratches on Meredith's and Wandrei's pressure suits as they stepped out of the shadows of the corridor. She was avoiding looking past them, at whatever the lab contained, and their broad shoulders mercifully blocked most of the view.